Definitions of Culture

From Sardar, Z. and van Loon, B. (eds.) (1997), Cultural Studies for Beginners, Cambridge: Icon Books. One of the older definitions of culture was given by the British anthropologist, Sir E. B. Tylor, in the opening lines of his book Primitive Cultures (1871): Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. pg. 4 Margaret Mead (1901-1978): Culture is the learned behaviour of a society or a subgroup. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006): Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988, Cultural Studies): Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions, 1958 "Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind."

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From During, S. (ed.) (1993), The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge. As the old working class communal life fragmented, the cultural studies which followed Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy developed in two main ways. The old notion of culture as a whole way of life became increasingly difficult to sustain: attention moved from locally produced and often long-standing cultural forms to culture as organised from afar both by the state through its educational system and by what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the culture industry, that is, highly developed music, film and broadcasting businesses. Much more importantly, however, the logic by which culture was set apart from politics was overturned. Pg. 4 - Introduction Since Tylors founding definition of 1871, the term has designated a rather vague complex whole including everything that is learned group behaviour, from body techniques to symbolic orders. There have been recurring attempts to define culture more precisely or to distinguish it from social structure. But the inclusive use persists. For there are times when we still need to be able to speak holistically of Japanese or Trobriand or Moroccan culture in the confidence that we are designating something real and differentially coherent. It is increasingly clear, however, that the concrete activity of representing a culture, subculture, or indeed any coherent domain of collective activity is always strategic and selective. The worlds societies are too systematically interconnected to permit any easy isolation of separate or independently functioning systems. The increased pace of historical change, the common recurrence of stress in the systems under study, forces a new self-consciousness about the way cultural wholes and boundaries are constructed and translated. Pg. 61 Clifford, J., On Collecting Art and Culture. Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept as the above definition demonstrates. Refracted through centuries of usage, the word has acquired a number of quite different, often contradictory, meanings. Even as a scientific term, it refers to both a process, and a product. More specifically, since the end of the eighteenth century, it has been used by English intellectuals and literary figures to focus critical attention on a whole range of controversial issues. The quality of life, the effects in human terms of mechanization, the division of labour and the creation of mass society have all been discussed within the larger confines of what Raymond Williams has called the Culture and Society debate. It was through this tradition of dissent and criticism that the dream of the organic society of society as an integrated, meaningful whole was largely kept alive. The dream had two basic trajectories. One led back to the past and to the feudal ideal of hierarchically ordered community. Here, culture assumed an almost sacred function. Its harmonious perfection was posited against the Wasteland of contemporary life. The other trajectory, less heavily supported, led towards the future, to a socialist Utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure was to be annulled. Pg. 358 Hebdige, D., From Culture to Hegemony.

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From Hall, S. (Ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Culture is one of the most difficult concepts in the human and social sciences and there are many different ways of defining it. In more traditional definitions of the term, culture is said to embody the best that has been thought and said in a society. It is the sum of the great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy the high culture of an era. Belonging to the same frame of reference, but more modern in its associations, is the use of culture to refer to the widely distributed forms of popular music, publishing, art, design and literature, or the activities of leisure time and entertainment which make up the everyday lives of the majority of ordinary people what is called the mass culture or the popular culture of an age. High culture versus popular culture was, for many years, the classic way of framing the debate about culture the terms carrying a powerfully evaluative charge In recent years, and in a more social science context, the word culture is used to refer to whatever is distinctive about the way of life of a people, community, nation or social group. This has come to be known as the anthropological definition. Alternatively, the world can be used to describe the shared values of a group or of a society which is like the anthropological definition, only with a more sociological emphasis. the cultural turn in the social and human sciences has tended to emphasize the importance of meaning to the definition of culture. Culture is not so much a set of things as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings the giving and taking of meaning between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express their ideas, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and making sense of the world, in a broadly similar way. Pg 2. Introduction Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917 Anthropology): "Culture taken, in its wide ethnographic sense is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The conditions of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action". Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942, Anthropology): "Culture is a well organized unity divided into two fundamental aspects -- a body of artifacts and a system of customs. Franz Boas (1858-1942, Anthropology): "Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the product of human activities as determined by these habits."

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Oxford English Dictionary: cultivation, tending, in Christian authors, worship; the action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage, husbandry; the cultivation or rearing of certain animals; the artificial development of microscopic organisms so produced; the cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners), improvement or refinement by education and training; the intellectual side of civilisation; the prosecution or special attention or study of any subject or pursuit. American Heritage English Dictionary: "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought." Merriam Webster: Etymology: Middle English, cultivated land, cultivation, from Anglo-French, from Latin cultura, from cultus, past participle Date: 15th century 1. cultivation, tillage 2. the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education 3. expert care and training <beauty culture> 4. a: enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training b: acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills 5. a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time <popular culture> <southern culture> c: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization <a corporate culture focused on the bottom line> d: the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic <studying the effect of computers on print culture> <changing the culture of materialism will take time Peggy O'Mara> 6. the act or process of cultivating living material (as bacteria or viruses) in prepared nutrient media; also : a product of such cultivation. Dictionary of Modern Sociology: "The total, generally organised way of life, including values, norms, institutions, and artifacts, that is passed on from generation to generation by learning alone".

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