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Martyn Hammersley
CULTURE (Working draft)
'Culture' has long been recognised as a problematic term, and there have
been many efforts to define it. However, it is frequently used today as if its
meaning were clear and uncontested. Furthermore, it often seems to be
employed in vague and inconsistent ways.
Some 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 history. 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 – perhaps with an
ambiguity about the extent to which this needed to be actively induced. The
notion of ‘cultivation’ is closely related, along with that of Bildung in the
German context (Bruford 1975).
In much early usage the meaning of the word substantially overlapped
with that of ‘civilisation’, but the latter term was also sometimes used as a
contrast: 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 civilisation’. This reflected, in part, an opposition between
literature and art, on the one hand, and the role of science and technology in
underpinning industrialization, on the other. And this was often formulated
as a contrast between organic growth and mechanical artificiality. Such a
view was central to the thinking of Matthew Arnold – English poet, literary
critic, and school inspector – whose work was a particularly important
influence on the subsequent development of the concept of culture, and is
discussed later.1 However, within anthropology the terms ‘culture’ and
‘civilisation’ were treated as virtual synonyms in the nineteenth century –
here the focus of investigation was the evolution of society from primitive to
advanced stages.
1
The mechanical/organic contrast goes back at least to the writings of Herder. There have been important
national differences within Europe over the past three centuries in the interpretations of, and the relative
emphasis on, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’, as well as change in their meanings (see Kuper
1999:ch1). See also Leopold 1980ch6, Stocking 1987:ch1 and Elias 2000:chapter1, section II. The
culture-civilisation contrast was particularly influential in German thought, but also in the context of
English Romanticism which , as we shall see, informed Arnold’s conception of ‘Culture’.
1
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 a singular form by cultural critics like Arnold, and also by
anthropologists, despite the other differences in the meaning they gave to the
term. However, even in the eighteenth century, Herder had recognised a
plurality of cultures, and suggested that each must be understood in its own
terms. Herder’s ideas were subsequently taken up in the Romantic
movement, encouraging an emphasis on the value of ‘folk culture’ and of
distinctive national cultures. Another important inheritor of Herder’s ideas
was nineteenth-century German historicism (Iggers 1968; Beiser 2011).
Even more significant was the ‘Völkerpsychologie’ of Steinthal and Lazarus,
subsequently developed by Wundt (Kalmar 1987). Building on this, in the
early twentieth century, especially 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 focusing on the
evolutionary development of ‘culture’.2
The term ‘culture’ was also important in German sociology at the
beginning of the twentieth century, notably in the work of Simmel and of
both Alfred and Max Weber. In this context one of the primary concerns was
the distinctive culture of modernity and its consequences (see Loader 2015).
The concept was of less significance in Anglo-American sociology and in
the other social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century, but this
changed in the second half, when social classes and ethnic groups often
came to be seen as displaying distinctive cultures or ‘subcultures’ (Mintz
1956; Cohen 1958; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; CCCS 1972 and 1975;
Hebdige 1979), or as representing counter-cultures (Yinger 1960, 1982,
Miller and Riessman 1961, Willis 1977). Around the same time, in political
science there was a growth of interest in what was referred to as ‘civic
culture’ or ‘political culture’, this being treated as a key variable in
explaining the stability of governments (see Almond and Verba 1963;
Inglehart 1988). Meanwhile, in the sociology of organizations and
management studies, the notion of ‘organisational cultures’ became very
widely employed (see Smircich 1983). And this sense of the term, in
particular, has come to be part of everyday usage, for example in
It is also worth noting that there is, of course, a plural conception of ‘civilisation’, whereby a variety of
ancient civilisations are recognised, such as the Aztec, Inca, Egyptian, Sumerian, etc as well as the GraecoRoman.
2
2
declarations that the problem with some organization is one of culture, so
that ‘culture change’ is required. Finally, from the 1960s onwards, a whole
new trans-disciplinary field – Cultural Studies – came to be established,
which overlapped with, and rivaled, other social sciences, particularly
sociology.3
Out of this long and complex history three partially distinct meanings
of the word ‘culture’ can be identified. The first treats culture as singular.
And it refers primarily to ideas, forms of literature, drama, art, and music
that are judged to be especially valuable. Frequently, this is because they are
seen as encouraging the development of intellectual and moral virtues; as
contrasted with those forms regarded as worthless, or even as detrimental to
intellectual and moral development. I will call this the aesthetic sense of the
term, and I will capitalize its first letter when using the word in this way.
The second influential meaning of ‘culture’ also treats what it refers to
as singular, as varying in degree, and as of positive value. However, in this
usage, the term covers all aspects of life that are a product of learning and
adaptation, rather than of biological inheritance. Different societies,
historical and contemporary, are seen as possessing different degrees of
culture, or as representing different stages of cultural development, so that
they can be ranked in these terms: either in general or in specific aspects,
such as in some aspect of technology. So, from this perspective, the culture
of any society is, at least potentially, subject to evolution or development
over time. Sometimes this is conceived in linear terms, sometimes as
cyclical – for example with societies treated as going through phases
analogous to childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.4 A different kind of
sequential scheme is to be found in the work of Hegel and Marx. For them,
cultures existing at different times in Europe are simply different aspects of a
historical process of human development, each one representing a deformed
version of human nature, but at the same time containing elements of its true
form, with each being necessary for its eventual realization’.5 Even Marxists
3
More recently, Cultural Sociology has emerged as a named sub-discipline within sociology, with its own
journals; influential figures such as Elias and Bourdieu have worked in this field. See also Williams’ (1981)
concept of a sociology of culture, and McLennan’s (2006) argument for a ‘sociological cultural studies’. A
small number of economists have also given attention to culture, as represented in Journal of Cultural
Economics. There is also a Journal of Cultural Economy.
4
This can be traced back at least to Vico and Herder.
5
Civilisations outside of Europe were treated by Marx as deviations from this pattern of development that
were caused by distinctive features of the local environment, notably the need for large-scale irrigation
works if agriculture was to take place (see Wittfogel 1957). Marx was also elitist in that he regarded
3
and critical researchers who have abandoned this meta-narrative nonetheless
often adopt this sort of developmental conception of culture.
The third meaning of ‘culture’ is that which became central in the
discipline of anthropology, and across social science, during the twentieth
century and up to the present. Here culture is not treated as singular but as
plural. However, as with the second meaning it refers to all of what human
beings acquire through living in a particular society – as opposed to what
they inherit biologically – rather than being restricted to ideas, art, literature
and music. In short it relates to ways of life or modes of behavior in
particular contexts, and to ideas only as they relate to these. Furthermore, at
face value at least, this usage of the term is descriptive rather than
evaluative, in the way that the other two meanings are.6.
The differences between these three senses of the term ‘culture’
highlight many of the important complexities surrounding usage of this word
in social science, and it is therefore worthwhile examining the sources and
character of each of them in more detail, before considering how the concept
has been employed within Sociology and also in the field of Cultural
Studies. As already noted, the first meaning is closely associated with
nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural criticism; the second with the
philosophy of history, early anthropology, and Marxism; and the third with
twentieth century social and cultural anthropology, though it has spread to
other social sciences as well.
Culture as aesthetic sensibility
Probably the most famous definition of ‘Culture’ in the English-speaking
world was provided by Matthew Arnold. He declared that Culture consists of
‘the best that has been known and said in the world’ (1873:preface).7 The
reference here is to literature and ideas, and in particular to those which were
characteristic of the classical humanist tradition that developed in Europe
after the Middle Ages, drawing on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome.
bourgeois society and culture as a more advanced form than feudal society, and than those various kinds
of traditional culture to be found persisting in non-Western societies (Avineri 1968), a form of elitism
was taken over by Vygotsky and Luria in their studies of Russian peasants, see Gielen and Jeshmaridian
1999.
6
However, while there is no recognition of varying degrees of culture, cultures tend to be treated as all of
value in their own terms.
7
A similar notion, presented via the concept of civilization, developed in France, see Burke 1973.
4
Arnold treats Culture as a source of knowledge and understanding that is
essential to living well: it embodies an ideal of the good life, and indicates
how this can be realized in the face of a contingent world – ‘the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune’.
Arnold has sometimes been seen as promoting the culture of a
dominant elite or class (see, for example, Turner 1990:42 or McGuigan
1992:21). And it is true that something like the kind of Culture that he
championed came to operate in this way in the early twentieth century.
However, as will become clear, this does not fit closely with his perspective
or intentions. Given that his position is frequently misrepresented, it requires
attention here.
Arnold emphasizes the value of ideas and attitudes drawn from
literature and the humanities as offering a higher form of understanding and
appreciation that serves to develop character and virtue. As this indicates, a
conception of the cultured person is implied, so that indirectly Culture
relates to all aspects of a person’s life. Indeed, for Arnold, what was
important about ‘the best that has been said and thought’ was that it
facilitated a process of personal development that could, in principle, lead to
what he refers to as ‘spiritual perfection’ (Arnold 1993:65 and passim). He
contrasts the value of this with material wealth. So, discussing those whom
he refers to as Philistines, Arnold writes: ‘Culture says: “Consider these
people, […] their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of
their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the
things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their
mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any
amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to
become just like these people by having it?”’. For Arnold, then, the focus of
Culture is on the ancient question of what is a good life, and the virtues that
contribute to, or are constitutive of, it.
Romanticism, as well as classical humanism, was a key influence on
Arnold; in particular, a Romantic understanding of poetry, and of literature
more generally, as having the capacity to go beyond the immediate
appearance of the world, and therefore beyond the scope of science, lifting
us above ‘lower’ desires to higher forms of enjoyment and better forms of
human relationship. What was central here was the capacity of imagination
to fuse perceptions and thoughts into recognition of a harmonious sense of
the whole meaning of life. As Coleridge (1907:6) remarked, imagination can
5
‘awaken […] the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and direct
[…] it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an
inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequences of the film of
familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear
not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand’. There is opposition here
both to the world as represented by natural science, which is viewed as
‘inanimate and cold’, and to the method that produces this – on the grounds
that it is not true to human life. And behind science, for Arnold and the
Romantics, lay the ‘industrial civilisation’ that was transforming English
society at the time (see Williams 1958). Thus, in effect, Arnold was putting
forward a version of another ancient argument, this time about the need for
virtue in citizens if a society and its members are to thrive, in the true sense
of realizing human ideals rather than simply increasing material wealth. In
this respect, like other influential figures at the time, he was reacting against
key aspects of the contemporary society and those trends in political and
religious thinking associated with them; though not in a simple reactionary
fashion.
Thus, many of Arnold’s polemics were against the materialism and
empiricism that he saw as increasingly influential at the time – for example
in the form of utilitarianism and the ‘philosophical radicalism’ closely
associated with it, alongside the growing commercialism of British society.
He interpreted these as suggesting that human beings should be conceived as
primarily, if not entirely, concerned with doing what they desired, with being
happy, valuing whatever pleased them. At the same time, he also stood
against religious tendencies of a Puritan kind that were, in his view,
aesthetically deaf and blind as well as morally restricted. In both cases he
was opposing what he saw as excessively narrow views of what is
worthwhile in life, those which downplayed or even denied the value of
literature and art, and the qualities that these cultivate.
While Arnold shared the widespread contemporary concern among the
middle and upper classes about the growth of the urban industrial working
classes, and the anarchy that their empowerment could bring about, he saw
this danger as arising primarily from the kind of society that Britain had
become: one in which Culture is not accorded its proper role. In effect,
feudal habits of deference had been eroded, and while this was not
undesirable in itself, there was nothing to replace these so as to preserve
social unity. Thus, most of his essay on Culture and Anarchy is a reaction
against what he sees as the rejection of Culture on utilitarian and/or religious
6
grounds by politicians and intellectuals associated with the rising middle
classes. He criticised them for their parochialism and self-satisfaction. At the
same time, in his essay on Equality he questioned the level of inequality in
the distribution of property in nineteenth century Britain, and also argued
that ‘an hereditary aristocracy, whatever its political achievements in the
past, was ill-equipped to understand a modern world that was […] inevitably
moving towards greater social equality’ (Collini 1993:x and xiii).
As this makes clear, Arnold acted as a cultural critic, in other words as
a critic of the culture (or cultures) – in the anthropological sense of the term
– that prevailed in Britain at the time he lived.8 As I noted earlier, his views
have often been seen as elitist, and it is certainly true that he believed there
was a superior form of cultural sensibility and that people varied
considerably in the extent to which they had achieved this. He writes that
‘culture indefatigably tries not to make what each raw person may like the
rule by which he fashions himself but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what
is indeed beautiful, graceful and becoming and to get the raw person to like
that’ (Arnold 1993:64). However, he did not believe that only an elite could
achieve spiritual perfection, nor that Culture was currently concentrated in a
single social class (he talks of ‘aliens’ within each social class who
appreciate Culture); indeed his primary concern was to encourage its pursuit
in all social classes. Furthermore, given that Culture had a moral function,
providing the joy and consolation required in the face of the trials and
disappointments of life, he believed that the state should play a key role in
promoting, and spreading access to it – particularly through schooling. He
saw this as desirable both because it enabled people to live more fulfilling
lives and because it would contribute to social harmony.
Arnold argued that all established practices and beliefs should be
scrutinised and judged by the highest standards, this requiring a degree of
detachment or disinterestedness. What he meant by this was that things must
be seen as they are, in their own terms, rather than according to whether they
are ‘consistent with the true tenets of the Protestant religion, or supported a
Whig or Tory view of the English constitution, or had an immediate bearing
8
Of course, Arnold was only one among several influential cultural critics in nineteenth century Britain,
Carlyle and Ruskin perhaps being the best known of the others (see Le Quesne 1982 and Landow 1985,
respectively). Many of them were opposed to what they viewed as the de-humanising features of industrial
society, emphasizing what had been lost from the past; though they differed both in what they took to be
most significant ills of modern life, in the criteria of evaluation they employed, and in the models from the
past on which these were based. See Collini 1991.
7
upon the great policy issues of the moment’ (Collini 1993:xvi). It was
precisely the tendency to adopt these restricted perspectives that in Arnold’s
view ‘narrowed and stultified the intellectual life of Victorian England’.
Arnold’s ideas, and the sources on which he drew, had considerable
influence during the later nineteenth century and into the first half of the
twentieth century. Indeed, as I noted earlier, this idea of Culture served to
define the identity of key segments of the upper and middle classes, and of
those who aspired to this status. Moreover, to a large extent, it came to be
institutionalized: through the education system in the UK, and by other
means as well. Collini (1988:3) notes that ‘Arnold’s ideas have been invoked
in justification of so many of those institutions which have contributed a
distinctive, and often distinctively high, tone to the cultural life of modern
Britain, such as the BBC, the British Council, and university departments of
English’.9
A conception of Culture and its role that is similar, in many respects,
to Arnold’s can be found in the work of twentieth century writers and literary
critics like T. S. Eliot. I. A. Richards, and F. R. and Q. D, Leavis – though
Eliot initially rejected Romanticism and the work of Arnold in particular
(Loring 1935). All of these writers opposed what they saw as the negative
spiritual consequences of industrial civilization and of the growing influence
of science. At one point Frank Leavis (1930:3) quotes Richards (1926:60-1)
to the effect that the critic of literature ‘is as much concerned with the health
of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. […]’. And in Leavis’s
work there is an emphasis on the important role to be played by a cultural
elite. In fact, he has less confidence than Arnold in the extent to which the
bulk of the population of Britain could come to appreciate Culture. For
example, in an influential pamphlet we find:
In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning
appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the
simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, firsthand judgement. They are still a small minority, though a larger one,
who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine
personal response. The accepted valuations are a kind of paper
currency based upon a very small proportion of gold. To the state of
9
However, what was involved here was significantly different in content and spirit from the classical
humanism that he espoused: Collini 1991:ch9.
8
such a currency the possibilities of fine living at any time bear a close
relation (Leavis 1930:3)
Both Richards and the Leavises were closely associated with the rise
of English Studies at Cambridge, and as part of this with developing a
distinctive canon of good literature to which students should be introduced.
This partly reflected the growth over the second half of the twentieth century
of efforts to formulate and celebrate a body of ‘English literature’, alongside
the emergence of the Oxford English Dictionary as a national institution.10
As Collini (1991:ch9) has pointed out this reflected a form of English or
British nationalism, signalling the important link between culture and
nationalism, alongside equally important connections to religion and notions
of ethnicity.
For the Leavises, in particular, Culture was to be contrasted with the
growing flood of commercial material aimed at a mass market: books,
newspapers and magazines; Hollywood films; and ‘light entertainment’
radio and television. So, what is shared with Arnold, above all, is the view
that literature and the arts have a moral function: they champion and
inculcate certain virtues and forms of life that are at odds both with the
leveling materialism of market forces and democracy, and with what was
seen as the spiritually deadening influence of science and industrialism.11
For Leavis, great works of literature are ‘an antidote, now the only possible
antidote, to the cheapening and corrupting of experience which the dominant
forces of modern mass society conspired to promote’ (Collini 1993:xxxii),
not least through the mass media. Industrial ‘civilisation’ was seen not only
as failing to provide what humans need in spiritual terms but also as in fact
degrading humanity, reducing human beings to machines or animals,
emphasizing information and knowledge over true understanding and
genuine feeling.12
10
Work on the development of a canon of English literature had already begun in the late nineteenth
century, and Leavis’s version was at odds with the rather chauvinistic, conventional view, partly as a
result of the influence of Modernism. Interestingly, Arnold was opposed to the setting up of English
literature as a university discipline, believing that it should be located in the study of Classics: see
Collini 1991:ch9.
11
These were, of course, themes in much nineteenth-century European thought, among conservatives and
some liberals.
12
While Leavis had a post in an elite university, he felt marginal to it; and he was also at odds with the
London literary scene. He saw his marginality as reflecting the effect of cultural corruption and decline.
9
The concept of culture in anthropology
The starting point for anthropological concern with culture was increasing
recognition that there were societies outside of Europe that had very
different ways of life and beliefs from those that Europeans took for granted
as normal.13 The existence of such societies had long been known, of course,
but with the growth of European colonialism and missionary activity, and
the increasing number of scientific expeditions to remote regions, greater
information became available and new attitudes started to prevail – not least
the desire to understand the reasons for the diversity.
Initially, in large part, the collection of data about these other societies
was an amateur enterprise, carried out by travelers and missionaries, so that
it was governed by diverse purposes, with little clear understanding of what
was relevant, in what terms it should be described, how it should be
conceptualized, etc. However, this changed with time, and, over the course
of the second half of the nineteenth century, data started to come from
trained observers and indeed from anthropologists themselves, as
anthropology became established within some universities (see Stocking
1983). Their attempts to explain cultural diversity drew, to some degree, on
ideas about the effects of geography and climate in producing very different
forms of social life, but (in Britain, the USA, and France, especially) it
rested above all upon a notion of social evolution: the idea that some
contemporary non-European societies could be seen as living relics of social
forms that had previously been dominant in the history of human life on
earth, so that by studying them much could be learned about the early past of
European society itself. This reflected the fact that at this time the discipline
covered the physical as well as the social and cultural aspects of human
beings, and was also closely associated with archaeology.
13
This was accompanied by growing awareness that the ways of life of people in the classical worlds of
Greece and Rome, on which European culture drew, had been very different from those of modern
Europe. It is important to note how the predominant meaning of the term ‘anthropology’ changed from
the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Originally, it referred to the investigation of human nature
(particularly its mental aspects) in naturalistic terms, drawing on both theology and medicine.
Underpinning this, often, were attempts to resolve the problem of Cartesian dualism. But in the
nineteenth century, anthropology increasingly came to refer specifically to the study of ‘primitive’
societies, in order to trace the development of the mental and social characteristics taken to represent
the highest form of civilization, exemplified by some features of Western European culture, notably
science. See Hammersley 2016.
10
This evolutionary perspective (which preceded that of Darwin and
differed from it in important respects) involved an evaluative framework,
according to which there had been a growth of culture from the earliest
‘primitive’ communities, through what were labelled as ‘barbarian’ forms,
leading eventually to the display of civilization in contemporary Europe.
However, there were disagreements about the nature of this process, and
sometimes rejection of key aspects of it. Furthermore, there was a
subordinate strand within Western thinking, dating back at least to
Montaigne’s (1580) essay ‘Of Cannibals’, and fuelled particularly by
Rousseau’s criticism of Western , and especially French, culture or
civilisation, in which the emphasis was on what had been lost in the
development of European societies, so that other cultures were seen as
superior in significant respects. Closely related was the influence of ideas
about the growth and decline of cultures, found for example in the work of
Vico and Montesquieu (Stocking 1987:13-14). But most influential of all as
a counter to evolutionism was German anthropological work in the second
half of the nineteenth century which, much more than that in other countries,
was shaped by Herder’s emphasis on the diversity of cultures, this leading to
a rejection of any simple evolutionary progressivism (Stocking 1995; Penny
and Bunzl 2003).14 Also important here were methodological arguments, in
particular distrust of evidence about the pre-history of European societies,
and about the pasts of currently existing ‘primitive’ societies. It was argued
that the focus of anthropology should be on the current operation of these
societies, for what they can tell us about diverse forms of social organization
and culture.
It is, of course, significant that anthropology developed during a
period when several European societies had established or were establishing
colonial empires, and the work of anthropologists came later to be sponsored
by some Western governments because it was believed to provide an
important resource in colonial administration. This certainly influenced the
attitudes and work of many anthropologists, even if there were tensions and
conflicts.15 In Britain, one reason for this was probably that by the early
twentieth century anthropologists had begun to abandon the previously
dominant evolutionary framework, in favour of diffusionism and later
14
Herder’s views were complex, and they changed over time: within them can be found both evolutionary
and relativist elements. On Herder, see Zammito 2002; Forster 2010; Beiser 2011:ch3.
15
From the start the relationship was by no means straightforward: see Kuper 1999:ch4. In the German
context it has been argued that colonialism had little effect on late nineteenth-century anthropology:
Penny and Bunzl 2003.
11
functionalism, both of these theoretical trends encouraging a stance of
cultural relativism: treating different cultures as unique configurations of
traits or as distinctive social systems, rather than as representing different
stages of human development. And this was at odds with colonial ideology,
in terms of which Western colonizers saw themselves as representing an
advanced form of civilization, which had a right, or even an obligation, to
‘civilise’ the rest of the world.
An early and very influential anthropological definition of ‘culture’
was that provided by the nineteenth century English anthropologist Edward
Tylor. For him, the word referred to ‘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’ (Tylor 1871:1). There has
been disagreement about how closely Tylor’s definition relates to later
anthropological usage (Stocking 1968:ch4, 1987; Leopold 1980), but while
there are certainly important differences, it does indicate key features of
what came to be taken as the anthropological conception of culture, even if
only in embryonic form.16
First of all, Tylor’s definition emphasizes that culture is ‘acquired as a
member of society’, rather than through biological inheritance.17 Another
contrast here is with the differences that are to be found amongst individual
people as regards abilities, skills, temperament, personality, etc, which
started to be explored by psychologists at the time Tylor was writing. Such
contrasts highlight some of the key boundaries around the discipline of
anthropology, and also important limits to what is covered by the term
‘culture’; even though these have sometimes been challenged or eroded.
Secondly, Tylor’s definition of ‘culture’ is comprehensive in covering
not just literature, art, and ideas but also ‘morals’, ‘law’, customary or
habitual behavior, and technologies. In effect, virtually all aspects of human
social life are included in the definition. As noted earlier, this broad focus
has been a characteristic feature of most twentieth-century social and
cultural anthropology. Moreover, while there has been a tendency to treat
16
On the differences between Tylor’s approach and that of later anthropologists, see Stocking 1987:302. Of
course, it is misleading to assume that twentieth-century anthropology shared a single concept of
culture, but I will adopt this fiction for the moment.
17
In fact, in the nineteenth century there was a frequent tendency to conflate culture with race, biological
inheritance often being seen as including ‘acquired characteristics’ learned by people in the course of
their lives (Burrow 2000).
12
some aspects of culture as more important than others, this has rarely
involved a prioritization of literature and philosophy, not least because,
typically, most anthropologists studied non-literate societies, at least up to
the middle of the twentieth century. Instead, in much functionalist
anthropology there was a tendency to emphasise the key role played by
norms and values, along with myths and rituals, in maintaining social
cohesion. Later, along slightly different lines, cultures came to be
conceptualized by some anthropologists as symbolic systems. One result
was the cognitive anthropology developed in the United States by
Goodenough, Frake, and others; alongside a parallel development in France,
drawing on a different tradition of structuralism, represented by the work of
Lévi-Strauss. Other anthropologists, while retaining the idea of culture as a
symbolic system, drew on hermeneutics to present the use of cultural
symbols in human social action as fluid and performative rather than
determined by some underlying structure, the most influential example being
Geertz (see Kuper 1999:Intro).
Another historically significant feature of Tylor’s definition is that it
treats culture as a ‘whole’, suggesting that the different elements included
under the heading of culture shape one another; though in practice Tylor
tended to focus on the development of particular cultural traits (Stocking
1968:80-1). Such holism in the context of studying particular cultures, rather
than culture in the singular, came to be given great emphasis with the
development of functionalism, in the work of Malinowski and RadcliffeBrown, and also in the ‘culture and personality’ school of Benedict and
Mead. Here, cultures were seen as integrated or organic systems, and it was
insisted that they had to be studied as such (Kuper 1999:ch2).18
Tylor’s definition displays interesting similarities to and differences
from the concept of Culture employed by Arnold at around the same time.
Both used the term in a singular form, and treated what it refers to as having
universal social significance. However, Tylor and other nineteenth-century
anthropologists assumed long-term progress out of ‘primitive’ beginnings,
whereas Arnold looks back to the seventeenth century as the high point in
the development of Culture, this being followed by decline, particularly in
Britain, as a result of commercialism and industrialisation. Furthermore,
Arnold was explicitly engaged in cultural criticism of his own society,
18
Kalmar 1987 shows that many of these features were also characteristic of the concept of Volksgeist
developed by Lazarus and Steinthal.
13
whereas Tylor was concerned to document and understand the diverse forms
that human social life takes, and the beliefs and practices associated with
these, albeit in terms of development towards Western civilization.
While twentieth-century anthropologists have varied in some
significant ways as regards what sense they have given to the term ‘culture’,
and what role they have assigned it in their analyses, they have generally
treated it as a product of social innovation and learning, and have
emphasized the importance of values, norms, and beliefs expressed in
symbolic forms (Gamst and Norbeck 1976:6 and passim). The focus of their
research has been on documenting the variability of culture, understood in
these terms, to be found across geographical locations, and how this has
been influenced by, and shapes, social life.19 However, with the increasing
impact of Western societies on other cultures, and the effects of urbanization
in the Third World, anthropologists also started to give attention to the
phenomenon of ‘culture contact’, so that there was greater emphasis on
cultural borrowing among groups and on the adaptation of cultural practices
to new circumstances. Furthermore, many anthropologists began to carry out
research within Western societies, studying significant forms of cultural
variation within these, whether contrasting the rural with the urban or
examining the cultural adaptations of ethnic minority groups. Running
through social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century, though,
are not only different conceptualisations of ‘culture’, but also different
weightings given to this concept as against those of ‘social organisation’ and
‘structure’. This was true not just of those influenced by Radcliffe-Brown’s
structural functionalism but also of anthropological work shaped by
Marxism, where the relative weight of cultural and ‘material’ factors was
often highlighted.
Culture and sociology
The ‘anthropological’ concept of culture came to be adopted by many
sociologists and other social scientists in the second half of the twentieth
19
However, there was also a small but influential group of US anthropologists in the 1950s and 60s who
revived the notion of cultural evolution (see for example Steward 1955; White 1959, Sahlins and
Service 1960). However, most anthropologists sought to abstain from evaluating the cultural
phenomena they sought to understand, or at least from any negative evaluations. For an infamous
exception see Turnbull 1972, who dedicated his book to the people he studied as follows: ‘To the Ik,
whom I learned not to hate’. See also Beidelman 1973, Heine 1985, and Knight 1994.
14
century; and, as a result, the concept underwent further reinterpretation and
modification. One aspect of this in Anglo-American sociology, mentioned
earlier, was the identification of subcultures and counter-cultures within
large, complex societies. In particular, there was a concern with the
distinctive beliefs, values, attitudes, etc of groups that are subordinated or
marginalized within these societies, one interest being in how subcultures
can block social participation or social mobility. Very often, this was
conceptualized as the effect of a clash between the cultural orientation of the
marginal group and that of the dominant culture (see, for example, Miller
1958).
Use of the concept of culture or subculture to understand the behavior
of subordinate or marginalized groups also sometimes involved negative
evaluation of the culture concerned. A classic example of this is Lewis’s
(1959) concept of ‘the culture of poverty’: he saw this culture as keeping
some groups in poverty even when structural conditions had changed,
thereby in principle allowing them to improve their standard of living. While
Lewis was an anthropologist, this concept was taken up much more widely
in sociology and psychology along with associated ideas like ‘cultural
deprivation’. At the same time, this line of analysis was sharply criticized on
the grounds that all cultures should be respected and/or that it involved
blaming the victims of inequality by underestimating the role of structural
and situational factors.20
There has also been some sociological work focusing on elite or
dominant class cultures. While in some respects this too amounts to a
concern with a particular type of subculture, albeit one that is in the ‘centre’
rather than at the periphery of society, emphasis in this work has often been
on the way in which the aesthetic and other preferences of this dominant
class or elite have been imposed on society as a whole. Involved here is a
kind of mirror image of Arnold’s perspective: the content focused on is
similar – ‘high culture’ in the sense of literature, philosophy, and the arts –
but a different evaluation is involved: the primary concern is with how these
serve to reproduce a class-divided society.
20
It is important to note that Lewis worked with a conception of society that was strongly influenced by the
work of Marx, and certainly did not deny the role of structural conditions, though some who took over
the culture of poverty concept focused primarily on what they took to be the cultural and psychological
causes of poverty.
15
One of the most influential versions of this perspective in recent times
has been the work of Bourdieu. He treats what is of value within a society as
arbitrary, in the sense that it does not derive from any intrinsic or
transcendent source of value. Rather, value is seen as entirely an effect of the
exercise of power, a dominant group determining what counts as valuable
and formulating its value in ideological terms. He presents social class
differences in school performance, and in the obtaining of educational
credentials, and thereby in occupational destinations, as operating through
differences in ‘cultural capital’ available to children from different class
backgrounds – differences in the cognitive and other educationally-relevant
resources inherited or inculcated in homes. Those who possess this capital
tend to have much higher levels of educational achievement than those with
low levels of it, since they experience continuity between home and school
where others face discontinuity, lacking what is required. In this way, the
culture of the dominant elite or class serves to subordinate other classes and
groups. So, in this context, Culture is evaluated negatively, because of its
role in reproducing the class structure and social injustice.21
As noted earlier, the idea of culture also came to be used in the study
of organisations, generating a considerable literature on ‘organisational
cultures’. This built on earlier work that had distinguished between the
formal structures of organisations, these marking out the official distribution
of authority and responsibility, and the somewhat different informal patterns
that usually develop within organizations, often involving an at least
partially discrepant distribution of power: actors apparently in positions of
authority often being impotent in important respects, while some low status
positions exercise considerable power, especially in terms of veto or
redirection. These informal patterns came to be seen as resulting from the
development over time of local cultures among members of an organization,
or within particular parts of it, that were at odds with the formal structure of
authority. These cultures were sometimes seen as essential to the
organisation’s operation, but they could also be viewed as a source of
dysfunctionality or resistance (see, for example, Gouldner 1964).
The significance of Cultural Studies
21
However, it should be noted that there has long been a competing strand in Anglo-American sociology of
education which argues that social inequalities arise not from the imposition of an alien culture on workingclass and ethnic minority children but from a failure of the education system to provide them with equal
access to the knowledge and skills to which they are entitled (see, for example, Young 2008).
16
Cultural Studies emerged, from the 1960s onwards, as a newly named field
that straddled the humanities and the social sciences. It was concerned with
‘popular culture’ (Bennett et al 1986; Parker 2011) – a term whose
denotation is similar in many respects to what had previously been referred
to as ‘mass culture’ (Rosenberg and White 1957); though these two terms are
frequently taken to have very different connotations. So, much of the focus
of Cultural Studies came to be on the forms of entertainment provided by the
mass media, and their reception and use by audiences, as well as on the
music and literature distinctive to specific groups, for example particular
social classes or youth subcultures.
The term ‘popular culture’ carries several conflicting meanings.
Sometimes it refers to cultural forms that are aimed at and engaged with by
broad sections of the populace. Much of this takes the form of commercially
produced entertainments, from ‘bestselling’ books and magazines to soap
operas on television or popular films. However, the term is sometimes used
in a rather different way to refer to what is produced by ordinary people,
thereby overlapping somewhat with the notion of ‘folk culture’. This may
seem to exclude much of what is commercially produced, but it is often
argued that commercial forms are produced with an eye and ear to what will
be found interesting and engaging by the populace, therefore drawing on the
preferences and even ideas of ordinary people, and that this material is never
simply passively consumed but is to some degree appropriated and
‘popularised’ in the process.
The development of Cultural Studies derived initially from a
broadening of concern on the part of scholars in the field of English
literature to take in working class forms of literature, music and art – treating
them as of value, alongside elite cultural materials. And later it came to
involve a negation or reversal of the evaluative framework underpinning the
aesthetic sense of the term ‘Culture’. Where the Leavises and many other
commentators had treated mass or popular culture as undermining civilized
forms of life, the attitude of cultural studies writers in the 1970s and 80s was
very different. Indeed, they sometimes adopted a thoroughly positive attitude
towards such cultural forms, and certainly insisted that they should be
studied in their own terms not simply evaluated negatively or dismissed. In
other words, the hierarchy of cultural activities and products adopted by
Arnold and Leavis was rejected or even inverted.
17
In some respects this reflected a process of socio-cultural change. The
value given to Culture in the first half of the twentieth century was never
entirely uncontested, with distinctions like ‘high-brow’ and ‘low brow’, or
‘serious’ versus ‘light’, often being used with contrasting inflections. And,
after the middle of the twentieth century, the role of Culture as a status
symbol in society began to decline. This did not, of course, mean that
literature, music, and art were no longer used in marking social status.22 But
taste became more diverse, and was often closely tied to particular
culturally-defined identities, sometimes as part of fashion changes or
subcultural movements. This reflected an important cultural shift (Martin
1981), the result being a much more complex patterning of taste than was
characteristic of British society at the beginning of the century (Bennett et al
2009). This was a development that had already been noted by some
commentators in the US in the 1950s and 60s. For example, Bell (1965:ch1)
had emphasised the extent to which there had been a differentiation of taste
amongst the burgeoning middle classes, as well as increased enjoyment of
multiple forms of cultural production.
So, growth in the number and proportion of the population made up
by the middle classes (those employed, or related to someone employed, in
white collar, administrative, or professional occupations) was an important
factor. Another was increasing affluence even among some sectors of the
working class. This affluence expanded the markets for goods and services
of various kinds. Of particular importance for Cultural Studies was the
growth in disposable income available to young people and even children,
both directly and through their influence on parents. Also important was a
gradual change in the age structure of western societies, and an associated
change in attitudes, from a tendency for teenagers and young adults to be
primarily concerned with entry into adult society, towards a stronger sense
of generational differences, often marked by subcultural fashions, these
frequently being exploited by advertisers.23 These changes formed an
important background to the emergence of Cultural Studies.
22
Nor does culture exhaust all of the means that are used to establish such distinctions: on which see Daloz
2010.
23
While the 1950s seem to have been a pivotal moment in the development of youth subcultures and their
popular recognition, this process of increasing generational division had developed over several decades
prior to this, but that period was a time in which young people had disposable income and used it, and
thereby attracted the attention of commercial enterprises.
18
In some respects, Cultural Studies writers simply applied the
anthropological conception of culture to contemporary Western societies.24
For example, Willis (1979:185) defines ‘culture’ as ‘the very material of our
daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings’.
However, it is important to recognise that, in its early stages at least, Cultural
Studies was strongly influenced by the tradition of cultural criticism
exemplified by Arnold and the Leavises, via the work of Richard Hoggart
and Raymond Williams.
Hoggart and Williams started from the aesthetic concept of Culture,
but also transformed it in important respects. For example, where the
Leavises had looked back to an organic form of society that had been
destroyed by capitalism, and sought to preserve the tradition it had
developed as a remedy for the ills that now prevailed, Hoggart and Williams
pointed to the working class cultures in which they had been brought up – in
Yorkshire and Wales, respectively – as embodying those lost ideals, and
therefore as offering a living source from which the necessary rejuvenation
of social and cultural life could draw.
While these two authors shared this broad commitment, their work
was different in character. In his book The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart (1957)
sought to document working-class culture, in a manner analogous to a
sociological community study, but primarily on the basis of his own
experience of being brought up in Leeds. However, he also focused on the
damage that was being done to this culture by commercial mass media and
other forms of institutional change. By contrast, in Culture and Society
Williams (1958) traced the history of the tradition of thought that had placed
emphasis on the importance of Culture in the face of growing
commercialism and industrialisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. And he highlighted the potential contribution of working-class
radicalism and its institutions to the development of a common culture
attuned to changing economic and political conditions.25 In an early
influential essay Williams wrote:
24
This had also been done by the community studies movement; and, indeed, an increasing amount of
anthropological work later came to be focused on Western societies.
25
In fact, Frank Leavis was not blind to this. For example in his Introduction to Mill’s essays on Bentham
and Coleridge, he suggests that Arnold’s characterisation of the middle classes as philistine and of
working class communities as barbarian is a ‘simplification’ of the actual concrete complexities. His
source for this is Beatrice Webb’s autobiography, and her description of the community life of her
working-class cousins in a Northern Mill town (Leavis 1950:21).
19
There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value –
not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live
differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of
neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as
expressed by the great working-class political and industrial
institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society.
However, it is important to recognize that, like Arnold and the
Leavises, Williams and Hoggart were still concerned with distinguishing
what is of higher and lower quality in literature and the arts. And, like their
predecessors, they saw this as important because it relates to how well
people live, and to how their lives can become better. Moreover, while these
authors argued that there were valuable features to be found within
traditional working class culture, they were not championing this over the
dominant culture. Indeed, the superiority of much of what is available in the
latter was recognized. Thus, Williams writes:
At home we met and made music, listened to it, recited and listened to
poems, valued fine language. I have heard better music and better
poetry since; there is the world to draw on. But I know, from the most
ordinary experience, that the interest is there, the capacity is there.
Furthermore, he denies that the dominant culture is simply the product and
possession of the dominant social class, insisting that:
A great part of the English way of life, and of its arts and learning, is
not bourgeois in any discoverable sense. There are institutions and
common meanings, which are in no sense the sole product of the
commercial middle class; and there are art and learning, a common
English inheritance produced by many kinds of men, including many
who hated the very class and system which now take pride in
consuming it.
Even more surprisingly, perhaps, he acknowledges that:
The bourgeoisie has given us much, including a narrow but real
system of morality; that is at least better than its court predecessors.
The leisure which the bourgeoisie attained has given us much of
cultural value.
20
To repeat the point, neither Hoggart nor Williams were championing
working class culture against Culture. Moreover, in these writers’ work there
is still a conception of social life in which literature and the arts are seen as
playing a central role in people’s lives. Like Arnold, Williams saw education
as civilizing, so that restricted access to it was a form of deprivation: not
cultural deprivation in the sense of being deprived of all culture, but
deprivation of the wider experience of cultural works to which all should be
entitled because it facilitates personal and social development (Williams
1961).
It is important to note that there is a complex relationship involved
here between at least three elements: local working class cultures, Culture,
and the commercial orientation of bourgeois society and the ‘mass culture’ it
produces. What Williams and Hoggart objected to was barriers being put up
between elite and working class culture, not to any hierarchy of evaluation in
itself. Indeed, they both make negative judgments about much of the
‘culture’ of contemporary British society. And, in substantive terms, their
evaluations here are still quite close in character to those of Leavis, Arnold,
and the Romantics. They are very much opposed to a cultural populism that
would erode or reverse the hierarchy assumed by this tradition. This implies
that they were still operating with a concept of Culture, though certainly not
one that treats it as the property of an elite or of a single class. Also, like
Arnold and Leavis, they see developments within bourgeois society as
threatening Culture, including, or especially, as it is manifested in workingclass communities, and thereby undermining what is necessary for good
living.
It is important to underline these parallels with the position of Arnold
and Leavis because, within the field of Cultural Studies, there is a common
misreading of their work, particularly that of Williams.26 For example,
McGuigan (1992:21) describes the essay from which I have just been
quoting as ‘a clear and concise rebuttal of what, for purposes of brevity, can
be labeled “elitist” conceptions of culture’. Yet, as I have indicated, even
though Williams rejects any sharp contrast between elite and working class
culture, his concern was still with making ‘the best that has been thought or
known in the world current everywhere’ (Arnold 1993:79). This goes
alongside his celebration of key features of working-class culture, rather
26
One aspect of this has been a tendency to exaggerate the differences between these two writers. For
Williams’ own view of the differences see Williams 1957. See also Hoggart and Williams 1960.
21
than standing in opposition to it. Much the same is true of Hoggart. And
neither of these writers simply adopted the anthropological conception of
culture. Nevertheless, their work came to be seen as foundational for British
Cultural Studies, in which rather different modes of evaluation operated.
An important shift in the development of this field was marked by the
publication of Hall and Whannel’s (1964) book The Popular Arts. While
building on the work of Hoggart and Williams, these authors resisted their
tendency to see popular, commercially produced cultural forms simply as
products of capitalism and as undermining Culture. They argued instead for
recognition of different cultural genres, including those with popular mass
appeal, and insisted that these should be treated as of value in their own
terms (pp36-8). Nevertheless, they emphasised that within genres
evaluations can and should be made. An example is their claim that Adam
Faith ‘as a singer of popular songs’ is ‘by any serious standards far down the
list’ (Hall and Whannel 1964:28).
As I indicated, later work in Cultural Studies took this weakening of
the aesthetic hierarchy further, either suspending any concern with the
‘quality’ of cultural products or sometimes even celebrating the value of
popular forms of commercially-produced entertainments, such as soap
operas; precisely those forms that Leavis, and Williams and Hoggart, had
deplored. In other words they reversed the previously accepted hierarchy,
leading to an implicit or explicit de-valuing of what had come to be treated
as ‘elite culture’. Furthermore, where Hoggart and Williams had treated
mass culture as an external force eroding working class culture, many
writers in Cultural Studies emphasized how it had increasingly come to
inform many people’s everyday interpretations of their lives: to one degree
or another, most of us draw on films and television programmes to make
sense of our own experience, in much the same way that people use
literature of various kinds.
Another major influence on the development of Cultural Studies, one
that was evident in the work of both Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, was
Marxism. Of course, by the middle of the twentieth century, this was a
heterogeneous and internally conflictual ‘tradition’. The conflicts were not
just between Stalinist orthodoxy and Trotskyism but also between both of
these and various kinds of Western Marxism, such as those developed by
Lukacs and Korsch, by the Critical Theorists of Frankfurt, by Gramsci, by
Sartre, and by Althusser and his students, these all differing from one
22
another in significant respects. Not surprisingly given this, Marxism did not
provide a single perspective on the character or function of culture. Even
those Marxists who accorded it a central social role, as against those who
placed emphasis entirely on ‘material factors’ in shaping social life, differed
in their evaluations. There were Marxists who emphasized the role of culture
as sustaining bourgeois hegemony but also those who saw it as representing
a means of resistance to that hegemony.27 While many European Marxists in
the early twentieth century shared a negative evaluation of popular culture,
some later Marxists adopted a more positive attitude towards it (see, for
example, Swingewood 1977).
As in the case of sociological research, there came to be a focus on the
role of the mass media, and the cultural products they promote, in
reproducing social class, ethnic, and gender inequalities.28 However, this was
not usually seen as an entirely determinate process: as noted earlier, there
was often an emphasis on the extent to which mass media products draw on
elements from working class and ethnic minority cultures, and also on the
ways in which these are re-interpreted, and used in non-standard ways, this
often being taken by Cultural Studies writers to represent resistance to the
socio-political status quo.
So, under the influence of Marxism, a significant strand of work in
Cultural Studies became concerned with investigating the ideological role of
commercial cultural products aimed at a mass market. This clearly
challenged the tendency to valorize popular culture, also to be found in
Cultural Studies, this being dismissed as a fallacious form of political
radicalism. For example, McGuigan (1992:6) points out that ‘the uncritical
endorsement of popular taste and pleasure, from an entirely hermeneutic
perspective, is curiously consistent with economic liberalism’s concept of
“consumer sovereignty” […]’. It is important to underline, though, how
underpinning this line of argument was a developmental conception of
culture (the second sense of the term I outlined earlier), where different
types of culture were seen as reflecting stages of social development, and
sometimes as obstructing or facilitating progress from one to another.
27
There were also conflicting attitudes of Marxists towards the rise of modernist forms of literature and art
in the early twentieth century (Adorno et al 1980). Some, like Lukacs, condemned modernism, in
favour of more traditional forms, while others, such as Bloch, saw it as playing an important
progressive role.
28
However there is an argument to be made that they actually reduced cultural differences amongst the
social classes: see Bell 1965.
23
While at odds with any such developmentalism, the writings of
Barthes proved seminal for studying the ideological role of mass culture. He
provided a semiotic method of analysis that was taken up and developed by
Anglo-American Cultural Studies researchers, notably by Hall and his
associates. In his own work, Barthes focused on the way in which, via the
connotations of words and images, various aspects of popular culture – from
newspaper pictures to wrestling matches – served to convey messages that
reinforced dominant French bourgeois culture.
At the same time, there was also often an insistence that audiences do
not passively receive and internalise media messages, indeed it was
emphasized that they sometimes resist or redirect the ideological messages
purveyed. A balancing act was involved here, as in much other Marxist and
sociological work, between acknowledging the ideological role of the media
while yet denying that these can simply imprint attitudes on audiences. In
other words, the central theme was that social reproduction takes place in
and through cultural processes, but that it is not free of contradictions, and
indeed that these provide scope for progressive cultural politics.
Within Cultural Studies, a contrast has often been drawn between, on
the one hand, the ‘culturalism’ of Williams and Hoggart (and also of later
writers carrying out ethnographic and other studies of youth culture, such as
Willis), and, on the other hand, the ‘structuralism’ of those studying popular
cultural products, drawing on the semiotics of Barthes and others. However,
both these traditions operated within a set of assumptions that marked the
work produced off from the early writings of Williams, Hoggart, Hall and
Whannel – despite the fact that Hall was a key figure in these developments
(Hall 1980).
Another important influence on the development of Cultural Studies,
as for many other fields in the late 1970s and 1980s and subsequently, was
the development of ‘new social movements’, this label indicating their
difference from the more traditional class-based variety. Of particular
importance in terms of its impact here was feminist work, but also
significant were anti-racist, and gay and lesbian, activist movements. These
reinforced many of the political commitments underpinning Cultural
Studies, but also changed them in key respects, forcing the need to find
broader formulations of the character a radical perspective should take. Hall
(1992:281) argues that the project in which the Centre for Contemporary
24
Cultural Studies was engaged was the production of organic intellectuals, on
the model of Gramsci. However, this was hampered not just by changes in
the social class structure and the splintering of leftist political groupings, but
also by the emergence of the new social movements, whose activists
generally resisted any reduction of their struggle to a concern with
overthrowing capitalism. What emerged was a wider range of oppositional
movements, some of them desiring a completely new society, but one whose
character necessarily remained rather vague. In the context of specific
struggles, tensions necessarily arose amongst the various groupings on the
Left. More or less at the same time that this was happening, the forces of the
Right gained in power and influence, especially in the UK. One strand of
this promoted a traditional view of Culture (see Cox and Dyson 1971), but
an even more influential one championed ‘the economic logic of the
market’, precisely the sort of philistinism that Arnold, Leavis, and others had
challenged.
Within this conflicted field, the meanings given to the term ‘culture’
often blurred together an aesthetic focus on art works with the
anthropological sense of the term as referring to a whole way of life, but in a
manner rather different from both Arnold and the anthropologists. An
example would be Hebdige’s (1979) study of the aesthetic dimensions of
youth subcultures. Here any distinction between professional art production
and the cultural activities of ordinary people, especially young people, was
broken down.29
The Cultural Studies field that emerged from the confluence of all
these influences was, not surprisingly, heterogeneous. Indeed, to a large
degree it was united only by what it rejected: what was seen as the elitism of
Arnold and Leavis, on one side, and the reductionism and determinism of
orthodox Marxism, on the other. In place of these there emerged analyses of
popular forms of culture that, while often emphasising the role of capitalist
commercialism, also insisted on the originating sources of creativity that
underlie these forms, and while distanced from any orthodox conception of
Marxist processes of development, and even more from an exclusive
emphasis on social class divisions, nevertheless explicitly opposed
capitalism, and its associated imperialism (as well as patriarchy, racism, and
29
Of course, much of modern art in the twentieth century challenged the very notion of art as a distinctive
type of product, albeit relying upon this notion for commercial purposes. This is closely related to the
questioning of distinctions between higher and lower forms of literature or of music.
25
homophobia), emphasising potential sources of resistance and
transformation.
Problems with the concept of culture
As we have seen, the concept of culture has had a complex history. The
aesthetic sense of the term, the first of the three senses I identified, formed
part of a critique of prevalent attitudes in nineteenth-century British society.
It was used to identify the kinds of knowledge and appreciative capacities to
which all people should aspire. As I noted, it came out of a conception of
what a good life for a human being is; this, in many ways, following on
from, or indeed lying alongside, religious ideas and commitments. And
central to it was evaluation of forms of literature, art, etc, and the beliefs and
attitudes associated with them. However, later, Culture came to be criticized,
both by sociologists and by Cultural Studies writers, on the grounds that it
functioned as a dominant class culture that reproduced social inequality
through legitimating it. And within Cultural Studies, ‘popular culture’ was
celebrated or its various forms were assessed as regards their politically
progressive character and/or effects.
By contrast, anthropologists were primarily concerned with describing
and explaining the different ways of life, beliefs, and technologies as well as
kinds of art and music, etc to be found in non-Western societies. Here,
‘culture’ was defined in broad, rather than specifically aesthetic, terms.
Initially, the framework was an evolutionary conception of the growth of
civilization; employing what I have referred to as a developmental model of
culture, a concept also to be found, albeit in somewhat different form, in
Marxism. And this still retained an evaluative dimension. In twentieth
century anthropology, a suspension of evaluation was adopted as a means of
facilitating the understanding of ‘other cultures’, though it was also
sometimes extended into a more general ethical or philosophical principle of
value relativism, or multiculturalism, that specifically challenged the
discourse of Western imperialism, particularly in relation to ‘indigenous’
cultures. Here, the third sense of the term ‘culture’ was adopted.
This complex history has given the term ‘culture’ an array of
meanings still in circulation today. However, these are rarely explicitly
addressed when the word is used by social scientists, the effect being
vagueness or fluidity in meaning and thereby uncertainty of interpretation.
26
Some clarification can be provided by noting that usage of the term ‘culture’
is frequently implicated in one or more of the following contrasts:
Culture versus what is worthless or damaging; or culture as a
variable, so that degrees or levels of value can be differentiated. This
sort of ‘discrimination’ was, of course, central to the aesthetic sense of
the term, and also to negative evaluation of elite culture and positive
evaluation of working class or popular culture, as well as being built
into the second, developmental, sense of the term ‘culture’, where
cultural forms are assessed in terms of their progressive or regressive
character or effects. It is also worth noting that a positive valuing of
culture underpins not just nineteenth- but also twentieth-century
anthropological approaches. After all, evaluations of attitudes,
behavior, artifacts, products, etc in aesthetic and other terms are
ubiquitous in all societies, and these often involve appeals to
membership of a particular culture that is taken to be of superior
value. In this sense, evaluation is intrinsic to the very notion of culture
even in the third sense of the term; even where the analyst does not
engage in evaluation.
Culture versus rationality. This is a very different, but equally longstanding, contrast: it can be traced back at least to some of the key
figures in the Enlightenment. Here, ‘culture’ is treated as synonymous
with ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, or even with ‘myth’ and ‘superstition’.
Sometimes, it is argued that these must be eradicated in favour of
forms of rationality modeled on scientific thinking and/or on
economic calculation.30 This attitude was opposed by many twentiethcentury anthropologists, who emphasized the inner logics of other
cultures, and the rationality of action in terms of these. Similarly,
those working in the field of development studies pointed to the ways
in which local cultures could offer protection against the depredations
of capitalism and/or could actually facilitate economic development
(Geertz 1963; Hirschman 1970). Cultural critics on the Left, from
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno onwards, have also challenged
the dominant Enlightenment conception of rationality, treating it as
ideological, ironically as representing bourgeois culture, not least
those aspects of it implicated in Western imperialism.
30
This also relates to ‘culture’s’ complicated relationship to the concept of ‘civilisation’, mentioned earlier.
27
Culture versus biology. As we saw, this was the original contrast on
which the anthropological sense of the term ‘culture’ was based, and
even after the focus had shifted to differences between societies in
their practices, beliefs, etc this contrast still prevailed. In other words,
it was important both for evolutionary and cultural pluralist
approaches. However, in much nineteenth century discussion the
distinction between culture and biology was somewhat blurred as a
result of non-Darwinian views of evolution, according to which
cultural attributes could be biologically inherited; and also because
strong parallels or links were frequently drawn between biological and
cultural inheritance (see Burrow 2000). In the twentieth century, a
much sharper distinction between biology and culture was drawn,
with the implications of biology, and therefore of ‘race’, for human
behavior being downplayed by most anthropologists. Thus, while in
that century, and into the twenty-first, there have been attempts by
some biologists to explain human behavior in terms of genetic
inheritance, these have been sharply resisted by most anthropologists
(see, for example, Sahlins 1976).
Cultural versus material factors. Under the aesthetic sense of the
term, what was of most value in human life was contrasted with mere
material concerns. Here, ‘material’ referred to a preoccupation with
money and everyday practical matters, or more broadly with lower
rather than higher needs and desires, or with science, technique and
technology, rather than human feeling and spiritual matters. Within
anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, this contrast took a
different form, focusing on whether patterns of behavior are to be
explained as the product of values, beliefs, and modes of thinking, or
as the result of ecology, technology, and/or economic interests.
Within cultural studies, both culturalism and structuralism fell into the
former category, but there was also a political economy approach that
was materialist in orientation. And the question of the proper balance
between an emphasis on material and on cultural factors in social
explanations has been a matter of debate, with criticisms of idealism
on one side and of reductionism on the other (Williams 1981).
There is a further complication associated with this contrast:
built into nineteenth-century physical anthropology was the notion of
‘material culture’ – referring to artefacts of various kinds and to
technology. This was deemed to be cultural because it was developed
28
by human beings and passed on from one generation to another (rather
than being a product of biology). And in recent years the notion of
material culture has been revived, partly through renewed contact
between anthropology and archaeology (Miller 1987). Indeed, some
have argued that culture, in all its forms, is embodied in material form
and to have material effects (see Oswell 2006).31
As I have indicated, each of these contrasts is complex and is therefore
open to different interpretations. In combination, they generate a wealth of
confusing and sometimes conflicting connotations around the terms ‘culture’
and ‘cultural’. These seriously hamper understanding, so that those terms
cannot serve as effective tools for social analysis without clarification.
Equally important, though, embedded in the various senses given to ‘culture’
are some fundamental problems that are difficult to resolve, some of which
have already been mentioned. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the
question of whether social scientists should treat the meaning of ‘culture’ as
evaluative or descriptive.
Cultural evaluation and social science
As I noted earlier, there is an important sense in which evaluation is essential
to the very notion of culture, in all three senses of that term. This is overt in
the aesthetic and developmental uses of the term, but even a concern with
simply documenting different cultures more or less ‘in their own terms’
tends to assume the value of cultures and may also be read as endorsing the
evaluations of the culture being studied, legitimately or not. In other words,
suspension of evaluation by social scientists for the purposes of analysis is
sometimes extended into adherence to a form of cultural relativism or
populism.32 An illustration of the problems associated with this is provided
by Shweder’s (2000) discussion of the issue of female genital mutilation.
However, despite the close relationship between culture and
evaluation, in my view it is important for social scientists to adopt an
objective approach in their work, in the sense of avoiding evaluation of the
people, practices, institutions, etc that they are studying in anything but
31
In the mid-nineteenth century Lazarus and Steinthal put forward a very modern understanding of the way
in which ideal and materials elements of culture interpenetrated one another: see Kalmar 1987:679.
32
The reaction against Colin Turnbull’s (1972) study of the Ik, whom he described in negative terms, were
often formulated in these terms.
29
epistemic terms (Hammersley 2011). It is also important that, as far as
possible, they guard against any bias in their analyses arising from their own
cultural backgrounds, personal or political preferences, ethical
commitments, etc. This represents a commitment to what Weber, somewhat
misleadingly, labelled ‘value-freedom’ or ‘value-neutrality’.
It is perhaps necessary to underline that this does not imply that
evaluation is unimportant, far from it: it is central to all human activity. And
the value issues that, for example, the work of Arnold, Bourdieu, and
culturally relativist anthropologists highlight are certainly important ones.
However, they are not ones that scientific research can resolve on its own or
that social scientists have any distinctive authority in addressing. Given this,
the specific task of social science, as with natural science, should be
restricted to producing descriptive and explanatory knowledge (Hammersley
1995, 2015). Political and social commentary, the provision of policy advice,
advocacy, etc are separate tasks from this. Furthermore, documenting facts is
more difficult than often seems to be recognised, and a concern with
evaluating social phenomena can seriously distort the process. Given that the
justification for the existence, and indeed for the funding, of social science is
that it can provide more reliable factual knowledge than is available from
other sources, it is important to minimize the risk of such distortion. Equally
important, as I have indicated, social scientists have no claim to distinctive
expertise in producing evaluations, in the way that they do in the production
of factual knowledge.33
This does not mean that the social scientist must rid her or himself of
value assumptions. Nor does it deny that our motivation for doing research
and for studying particular topics is usually because we hope that doing this
will have practical benefit. Neither does it mean that social scientists must
keep their value assumptions a secret, not mentioning them in their research
reports. It does not even rule out indicating possible evaluative or
prescriptive implications that could follow from the factual findings
produced. What it does mean is that researchers must not aim at producing
value conclusions but only at producing factual ones, and that they must
work hard to guard against their own value commitments distorting their
pursuit of knowledge. Furthermore, in producing any recommendations on
the basis of their work they must make clear that these are conditional on
33
We should also not the failure of much evaluative commentary in cultural studies and other disciplines to
make explicit and to justify the value judgments involved
30
acceptance of the values making up the relevance framework in terms of
which the research has been carried out (Hammersley 2014).
As should be clear from the earlier discussion, much social science
usage of the term ‘culture’ does not adhere to this requirement. While few if
any social scientists today use ‘culture’ in the explicitly evaluative manner of
Arnold, as we saw ‘elite culture’ is sometimes negatively evaluated because
of what are taken to be its undesirable effects, while working class and
popular culture, and/or non-Western cultures, or parts of them, are positively
valued in terms of some developmental scheme or in political terms. There is
also sometimes advocacy of cultural relativism or pluralism as if this could
be validated by research (for example Herskovits 1958, Shweder 2000).34
So, in my view, the various evaluative senses of the term ‘culture’,
both positive and negative, should be avoided by social scientists. However,
there still remain other problems with usage of this term. In the next section
I will briefly outline these and indicate how the concept of culture might be
formulated in a way that avoids or minimizes these.
Other problems
Further problems with the concept of culture concern its relationship with
the notion of society, the question of whether there are distinct, clearlybounded cultures in the modern world (or, indeed, if there ever were), the
distinction between biological and social factors in the development of
cultures, and the idea of cultures as free-floating phenomena that shape
human actions.
Culture versus society. When ‘culture’ is treated as plural and interpreted as
referring to a whole way of life, it seems to swallow up much if not all of
what normally comes under the heading of ‘society’; and, for that matter,
‘economy’ and ‘polity’ as well. This problem stems not just from the way
that ‘culture’ is used but also vagueness in the meanings assigned to the term
‘society’. The latter is sometimes employed to refer to a particular nationstate, and nation-states usually have clearly defined territories. As a result,
34
In much social science writing these rather different positions are melded together into an inconsistent
tendency to valorise what is held to be devalued within current society, at least insofar as it fits within a
social scientist’s own values. This not only deviates from the requirement of ‘value-neutrality’ but also
falls short of the requirement that the values underlying evaluations should be clearly articulated.
31
they are sometimes treated as clearly-bounded systems. However, much of
what is typically put under the heading of ‘society’ is neither fully contained
within national boundaries nor insulated from what is outside. Furthermore,
while nation-states may have relatively coherent political structures, there
are also cross-cutting divisions of various kinds within them (for example, in
terms of social class, gender, ethnicity, age, etc), some of which have links to
other societies, as in the case of diasporic minorities and religious groups
that have institutional centres elsewhere. Moreover, ‘society’ may also be
used to refer to a component part of a nation, here being distinguished from
its polity and its economy, this sometimes (but by no means always) being
signaled by use of the phrase ‘civil society’. Finally, ‘society’ is sometimes
used to refer to what might be better called sociation: diffuse processes of
social interaction and the patterning of human relationships. All of these
usages overlap with some interpretations of ‘culture’.
Clearly bounded cultures? Early anthropological conceptualisations of
‘other cultures’ have been criticized for tending to assume that there are
isolated communities, each with its own distinctive culture. The problem is
that this neglects not only internal cultural differentiations but also the
sharing of cultural features across a range of different communities. With
growing recognition of the effects of globalization, the problems associated
with discussions of distinct cultures as functioning wholes has become even
more obvious. One effect of this, sometimes, has been to encourage a
narrowing of focus on to smaller groups, in the belief that they will display
coherent and distinct cultures. However, it is questionable whether even this
succeeds – there has been an increasing tendency to reconceptualise culture
in terms of multiple discourses that circulate even within small-scale settings
– and it renders the concept inapplicable in much social research. This issue
also relates to a longstanding problem in the sociology of knowledge
concerned with how cultural features can be rigorously attributed to
particular groups (see Child 1941), especially when attention is paid to the
contextually variable practices that lay people employ in doing this
(Moerman 1968; Sharrock 1944).
Biological and social factors in the development of cultures. Much usage of
‘culture’ assumes that a relatively sharp distinction can be drawn between
the biological and the cultural. This was prefigured in Lazarus and
Steinthal’s distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ ethnology in the midnineteenth century (Kalmar 1987:674). Later, the concept of culture is
implicated in battles between the social sciences and biology, with a
32
tendency for each side virtually to deny, or greatly to diminish, the role of
what concerns the other. Yet it is widely recognised today that ‘nature’ and
‘nurture’ affect one another, and are indeed interrelated in complex ways.
Moreover, previous attempts to conceptualise their relationship in an
additive fashion, so that their relative contribution to some specific type of
outcome – for example high intelligence – can be measured have been
shown to be inefffective. There have been some moves towards a
reconceptualization of this relationship, but these have not yet had much
impact on social research.
The idea of cultures as free-floating. Cultures have frequently been treated
as if they were free creations through which groups, communities, or
societies express themselves. Moreover, this issues in a form of cultural
determinism, sometimes centred on linguistic determinism. This runs against
the manner in which culture was viewed in the nineteenth century, when it
was frequently seen as consisting of the adaptations that human beings make
in order to live in particular environments. Moreover, what is involved here
is not just adaptation to physical environments but the interrelationship
between these and biological capacities, limitations, and needs, and
technological capacities. Furthermore groups of people develop habits and
institutionalized patterns of behaviour to address needs and pursue their
goals, and these themselves subsequently constitute part of the environment
to which later generations must adapt, one way or another, and will
themselves shape future cultural patterns: habits and institutions. We have a
recursive process here, and it is also an interactive process.
An attempt at conceptualisation
No single analytic concept can cover coherently all of the meanings that are
implicated in the term ‘culture’ as it has come to be used today. This means
that any attempt at conceptual clarification must focus on one of these
meanings, and concentrate on the analytic functions the term can serve. So,
what I will suggest here will not be found satisfying by anyone who wishes
to retain the multiple denotations and wide connotations of the term. Even
aside from this, whether this conceptualization will serve properly analytic
functions effectively remains to be seen.
The analytic function I will take as primary is the role of culture in
explaining actions or pattern of institutionalized behavior. In this context, I
suggest that the term is best treated as referring to the generative, learnt
33
capabilities, attitudes, habits, and technologies, that shape, and are drawn on
in, human behavior.35 As should become clear, this cross-cuts the distinction
between cultural and biological factors, it marks off culture from most
senses of ‘society’, and it eliminates any need to assume the existence of
distinct, free-standing cultures. In other words, the reference of this term
should be to all the predispositions and resources, each of which will be
shared (to varying degrees) with others, that belong or are available to a
particular agent at the point of action. In these terms, culture is one of two
factors that may be used to explain any action, any institutionalized pattern
of behavior, or any outcome of some other kind. The other factor is the
situation faced by the agent on the occasion concerned.36
Of course, these two sets of factors – cultural background and
immediate social situation – do not exhaust what must be taken into account
in the task of sociological explanation. For one thing, each is itself open to
further explanation: why is the cultural background of the agent what it is?;
and why is the situation how it is? Equally important, though, is the
interplay between culture and situation, and this can be more or less ‘active’
on different occasions. Much of human behavior has the character of
relatively routine action in which there is little deliberation, and very often
this action forms part of institutionalized patterns in which others play
similarly habitual roles that mutually support one another (see Berger and
Luckmann 1966 on habituation and institutionalization; see chapter on
‘structure’). Here there is little active interplay, though of course situations
still have to be made sense of as belonging to one type or another, and
thereby requiring one type of response rather than another. While habit is
rarely a matter of simple or literal repetition, it always involves free play and
at least some variation and drift over time, such institutionalized patterns can
nevertheless be contrasted with those where no established culturally given
course of action is prompted, where perhaps even the goals being pursued
are uncertain. In such situations, reflection and deliberation take place – at
35
This is close to the position taken by Steward. Note that it is assumed that biology plays a crucial role in
the development of the capabilities, attitudes, etc, but that it does not produce them in itself.
36
It is important to emphasise that the distinction between culture and situation is an analytic or relational
one: what is treated as cultural and what situational will depend upon the focus of inquiry, and in
particular who is the agent (individual or collective) whose behavior is being explained. After all, other
people will almost always represent the most important elements of the situation an agent faces, and
they will carry cultural features with them that shape their behavior and thereby that situation. What this
highlights is the need for the focus of any analysis to be made quite clear, since this will determine what
counts as culture and what is situation for its purposes. I should also point out that individual agents can
act on behalf of groups, organisations, etc, rather than simply on their own behalf.
34
least where scope for this is available – often involving considerations of
strategy and tactics. As a result, the outcome will be less predictable from
knowledge of culture and situation, since elements of both may be open to
reassessment, or even to radical reconceptualisation, and thereby adaptation,
in the process of action.37
We should also note the way in which what we might call the strings –
the shared elements – of culture, for example as they operate within
particular families, households, peer groups or local communities, may be
drawn together more tightly, materially as well as symbolically, through
processes of identification – a sense of mutual belonging. A similar process
may occur more widely through the mobilization of support under the
banner of some distinctive ethnic, religious, or national identity. This
drawing together, creating rather stronger parallels in attitude and behavior
among members than existed previously, at the same time involves the
loosening of links or ties elsewhere in the network, indeed the marking off
of boundaries and out-groups, again both symbolically and materially.
However, such a process does not eliminate the sharing of cultural features
across these boundaries.
The interpretation of the term ‘culture’ I have put forward here, while
by no means original, is at odds with much conventional usage, where the
word is commonly treated as virtually synonymous with ‘community’ or
‘society’, or conversely is restricted in reference to values and norms or to
‘symbol systems’. It seems to me that these approaches either render the
term superfluous or restrict its meaning too narrowly. Furthermore, while the
approach recommended here allows for cultural variability, it does not
require there to be distinct and internally homogeneous cultures. Instead, we
can recognize that any actor carries within her or himself a range of cultural
tendencies and resources that are differentially shared with others. Nor is
there any need to assume that the cultural tendencies and resources
characteristic of any individual person at a particular time form a coherent
whole. While there may well be a strain to consistency, it seems likely that,
as Schutz (1962) argued, this operates only sporadically – emerging when
inconsistencies give rise to problems or puzzles – so that there are always
likely to be tensions in the cultural background of any actor, and such
37
In outlining this conceptual context in which the sense of ‘culture’ I am recommending operates, I have
specifically avoided the term ‘structure’ because of its problematic nature. It should be obvious, though,
that what that term is typically used to refer to by social scientists shapes both culture and situation, and
thereby the interplay between them. See chapter on Structure.
35
tensions may have explanatory significance, just as may tensions within the
situation faced.
It is important to recognize the analytic or functional character of the
concept of culture being put forward here. In Weberian terms it is a way of
making sense of what in concrete terms is extremely complex, variable and
changing. So, for example, in these terms it would make no sense to think of
culture, or of a culture, as a stable object existing in the world on analogy
with physical objects or even specific social organizations. Indeed, what
counts as culture, and what as situation, is specific to the focus on a
particular agent (individual, group, or organization|) in relation to some
particular decision, action or outcome. After all, previous situations will
have shaped what culture an individual or group brings to a situation, and
that situation will also be constituted by the cultural resources that other
participants in the situation carry with them at the time. In other words, what
is treated as culture is agent-, location-, and time-relative.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have examined the various traditions that have informed the
ways in which the term ‘culture’ is used today in the social sciences, and the
different senses of the term that these have generated. I have also discussed
the various problems surrounding usage of the term, and suggested a
reformulation of the concept that largely avoids these problems. Whether
this will turn out to be productive remains to be seen.
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