Culture

Chris Jenks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134303274
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture is a concept that has remained on the top of the agenda within the social sciences for two decades. It incites controversy and debate and always appears fresh. This book, updated throughout and with new sections on visual culture, urban culture and subcultures, argues that to understand the concept we need to locate it within traditions of thought and appreciate its political and ideological bases. The book looks at the concept of culture in the context of idealism and materialism, examining its relation to the notion of social structure and assessing its once assumed monopoly within literary study. Culture remains stimulating throughout. A standard reference text for students on sociology and cultural studies courses, this second concise and student-friendly edition offers an overview over the sociology of culture in an accessible format.

1

THE ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE LITERARY TRADITION

there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not be the clever savages of Golding’s Lord of the Flies thrown back upon the cruel wisdom of their animal instincts; nor would they be the nature’s noblemen of Enlightenment primitivism or even, as classical anthropological theory would imply, intrinsically talented apes who had somehow failed to find themselves. They would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognisable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases.

(Geertz 1965: 112-13)

So what then is this thing called culture? What is this mediation that appears to rob ‘man’ of his nature and locate his action and practices within an endowment of socially produced symbolic forms? Culture itself, whatever its facticity, is also a concept with a history, some of which we shall try and trace in the chapters that follow. It is hoped that we will not succumb to any one ‘origin myth’ for, as anthropologists would tell us in relation to primitive cosmologies, such devices only serve to exercise closure, they silence debate and controversy and, usually, justify the existing rationale for the status quo; nevertheless we will ‘dig around’ for sources, albeit competing ones.

One compelling account, and one that I shall trade off because it is symbiotic with the upsurge of social theory, is that the idea of ‘culture’ can be witnessed emerging in the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth century as part of, and largely as a reaction to, the massive changes that were occurring in the structure and quality of social life (which we might also refer to as the advance of modernity). These changes, at the social, political, and personal levels, were both confusing and disorientating, and certainly controversial. Such changes, through industrialization and technology, were unprecedented in human experience; they were wildly expansionist, horizons were simply consumed; grossly productive, for good and ill; and both understood and legitimated through an ideology of progress. The social structure was politically volatile, being increasingly and visibly divisive. This was a situation brought about through the new forms of ranking and hierarchy that accompanied the proliferating division of labour, combined with the density and proximity of populations resulting from urbanization and the improved system of communications. In one sense the overall aesthetic quality of life, compared with the previously supposed rural idyll, was threatened by the machinelike excesses of industrial society. There was an increasing gap between the creative and the productive, formulated for materialism by Marx as ‘alienation’, and for the romantic-idealist tradition by Carlyle as a loss of the folk purity of a past era. The machine was viewed as consuming the natural character of humankind, a call to be later echoed in the work of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin’s ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, even Marcuse’s sense of ‘one-dimensionality’, and finally the cri de coeur of Baudrillard’s evocation of postmodernism with its horror of simulacra. Whereas we began with ‘culture’ mediating between humankind and nature, it can now be seen to mediate between humankind and Machine. This provides us with several available ‘meanings’ of culture.

Another account looks back to classical society. ‘Civilization’, deriving from the Latin civis, is a term descriptive of a state of belonging to a collectivity that embodied certain qualities, albeit self-appointed, which distinguished it from the ‘mass’ or more lowly state of being typified as that of the ‘barbarian’. Such was the ancient Greek and Roman sense of identification with nation and state.

In this context the idea of ‘culture’ is not so much descriptive as metaphoric and derives, philologically, from the agricultural or horticultural processes of cultivating the soil and bringing fauna and flora into being through growth. Whereas the former concept, ‘civilization’, is descriptive of a kind of stasis, a membership, a belonging, indeed a status once achieved not to be relinquished; the latter, ‘culture’, is resonant with other ideas of emergence and change, perhaps even transformation. Thus we move to ideas of socialization as ‘cultivating’ the person, education as ‘cultivating’ the mind and colonialization as ‘cultivating’ the natives. All of these uses of culture, as process, imply not just a transition but also a goal in the form of ‘culture’ itself; it is here that hierarchical notions begin to emerge such as the ‘cultured person’ or ‘cultivated groups or individuals’ and even the idea of a ‘high culture’, all of which reduce the metaphoricity of process and begin to coalesce with the original notion of a descriptive state of being not essentially unlike the formative idea of civilization itself. However, we are provided with another set of ‘meanings’ for culture.

Sociologists and anthropologists have come to account for the concept of culture in a variety of ways. In its most general and pervasive sense it directs us to a consideration of all that which is symbolic; the learned, ideational aspects of human society. In an early sense culture was precisely the collective noun used to define that realm of human being which marked its ontology off from the sphere of the merely natural. To speak of the cultural was to reaffirm a philosophical commitment to the difference, particularity and supposed plasticity that is ‘humankind’. Animals, even the chattering dolphins, ‘do’ nature, while human beings inevitably transform their world into, and by way of, a series (perhaps an infinite series) of symbolic representations. The symbolic then satisfies and absorbs the projections of human beings into objects and states of affairs that are different, and it also acts as a mediator between these two provinces. We no longer confront the natural as if we were continuous with it, as it is supposed that animals do. We now meet with the natural and, indeed, experience it as preformed, through our vocabulary of symbols which are primarily linguistic but increasingly elaborate, out into other forms like custom, convention, habit and even artefact. The symbolic representations that constitute human knowing are, in their various groupings, classifications and manifestations, the cultural. The very idea of culture therefore generates a concept which, at one level, provides a principle of unification for the peoples of the world, through time and across space. Culture then, for early anthropology, was the common domain of the human; it distinguished our behaviour from that of other creatures and it provided a conceptual break with the dominant explanatory resource of biological and, latterly, genetic determinism. From this happy state of egalitarian one-ness through the aegis of culture – the very inspiration for cultural anthropology – the story takes a different turn and we move into accounts of diffusion, stratification, hierarchy and relativism, still clinging to the unrevised central concept of culture. Some of these tributaries and their ramifications we shall explore later in the text.

The dominant European linguistic convention equates ‘culture’ largely with the idea of ‘civilization’: they are regarded as synonymous. Both ideas may be used interchangeably with integrity in opposition to notions of that which is vulgar, backward, ignorant or retrogressive. Within the German intellectual tradition, to which we shall be repeatedly drawn, a different and particular sense of culture emerged that was to assume a dominant place in our everyday understandings. This was the romantic, elitist view, that culture specified the pinnacle of human achievement. Culture, in this sense, came to specify that which is remarkable in human creative achievement. Rather than encapsulating all human symbolic representation, German Kultur pointed us exclusively to levels of excellence in fine art, literature, music and individual personal perfection. The main body, or in this formulation, the residue of what we have previously meant as culture, was to be understood in terms of the concept of Zivilisation. This distinction, by no means fine, in many ways reflected the dichotomy provided by Kantian philosophy between the realms of ‘value’ and ‘fact’, and was generative of two different ways of understanding and relating to the world. These realms were systematically promoted into an antagonism at one level utterly esoteric and of interest to philosophers only, but at another level the very grounds of the spurious doctrine of racial superiority that provided an impetus to the Holocaust. We will discuss this divide later in relation to idealism and materialism and cultural stratification, but we might here note that such distinctions also gave rise to the belief that the human spirit (perhaps the Geist itself) came under successive threat with the advent and advance of modernity and the inexorable process of material development which, it was supposed, gave rise to an increasingly anonymous and amorphous urban mass society; thus linking with our initial argument. The impersonal, yet evil, forces of standardization, industrialization and technologies of mass production became the analytic target for the romantic neo-Marxist criticism of the Frankfurt School within their theories of aesthetics, mass communication and mass society, and also in the early sociology of culture propounded by Norbert Elias with his ideas of the ‘civilizing process’.

Within the confines of British and American social theory the concept of culture has been understood in a far more pluralist sense and applied, until relatively recently, on a far more sparing basis. Although culture is a familiar term within our tradition and can be employed to summon up holistic appraisals of the ways of life of a people, their beliefs, rituals and customs, we social scientists are rather more accustomed to mobilizing such batteries of understanding into ‘action sets’. That is, we tend to use more specific concepts like, for example, ‘value systems’ (even ‘central value systems’), ‘patterns of belief’, ‘value-orientations’ or more critical notions like ‘ideologies’. Culture to British and American social theorists tends to have been most usefully applied as a concept of differentiation within a collectivity rather than a way of gathering. That is to say that the concept has become artfully employed in, for example, the sociology of knowledge that Karl Mannheim recommended, and also in the spectrum of perspectives on the sociology of deviance – ranging from Parsonian theory through to symbolic interactionism – in the manner of ‘subculture’. A subculture is the way of defining and honouring the particular specification and demarcation of special or different interests of a group of people within a larger collectivity (as we shall see in greater depth in Chapter 7). So just as classical sociology in the form of Tönnies or Durkheim, or indeed Comte, had recognized that the composition of the overall collective life emerged through the advance of the division of labour – by dint of the fragile integration through interdependence of a whole series of smaller, internally cohesive, social units – so also does modern social theory by articulating the specific mores of these minor groups, albeit often as ‘non-normative’ or even ‘deviant’. This dispersion of subcultures is at the base of what we might mean by a ‘pluralist’ view of culture; it is modern and democratic and shies away from all of the excesses of a grand systems theory with all of its incumbent conservative tendencies and its implicit ‘oversocialized conception of man’ (Wrong 1961). Such thinking succumbs, however, to the problem of order. Without a coherent, overall theory of culture (which still, in many senses, eludes us), it is hard to conceive of how consensus is maintained within a modern society. In response to precisely this problem, contemporary Marxism has generated the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ which supposes that varieties of hegemonic strategies of mass media and political propaganda create a distorted illusion of shared concerns in the face of the real and contentious divisions that exist between classes, genders, ethnic groups, geographical regions and age groups. Such a thesis is by no means universally accepted within the social sciences and in many ways the more recent explosion of interest in and dedication to the schizophrenic prognosis of postmodernisms (and even complexity theory) positively accelerates the centrifugal tendencies of the cultural particles.

I will now attempt to summarize some of the above accounts of the genesis of our concept ‘culture’ through a fourfold typology from which we can move on.

1. Culture as a cerebral, or certainly a cognitive category. Culture becomes intelligible as a general state of mind. It carries with it the idea of perfection, a goal or an aspiration of individual human achievement or emancipation. At one level this might be a reflection of a highly individualist philosophy and at another level an instance of a philosophical commitment to the particularity and difference, even the ‘chosenness’ or superiority of humankind. This links into themes of redemption in later writings, from Marx’s false consciousness to the melancholy science of the Frankfurt School. In origin we will see it mostly in the work of the romantic literary and cultural criticism of William Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and latterly Matthew Arnold.
2. Culture as a more embodied and collective category. Culture invokes a state of intellectual and/or moral development in society. This is a position linking culture with the idea of civilization and one that is informed by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809–82) and informative of that group of social theorists now known as the ‘early evolutionists’ who pioneered anthropology, with their competitive views on ‘degeneration’ and ‘progress’, and linked the endeavour up with nineteenth-century imperialism. This notion nevertheless takes the idea of culture into the province of the collective life, rather than the individual consciousness.
3. Culture as a descriptive and concrete category. Culture viewed as the collective body of arts and intellectual work within any one society. This is very much an everyday language usage of the term culture and carries along with it senses of particularity, exclusivity, elitism, specialist knowledge and training or socialization. It includes a firmly established notion of culture as the realm of the produced and sedimented symbolic; albeit the esoteric symbolism of a society.
4. Culture as a social category. Culture regarded as the whole way of life of a people. This is the pluralist and potentially democratic sense of the concept that has come to be the zone of concern within sociology and anthropology and latterly, within a more localized sense, cultural studies.

A PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION: ARISTOTLE, LOCKE, VICO, TURGOT AND BENTHAM

Although, as one major strand in our modern thinking displays, culture is often understood in relation to achievements within the realms of art and literature, the nearest classical approximation to our present-day view is found not in the study of aesthetics but in moral philosophy. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics reveals an understanding of human excellence, shared normative expectations as evaluative criteria, and a sense of the natural disposition of humankind to such achievement. The work rests on an essential teleology that all things are to be understood in terms of their purposes but their purposes are not wilful, nor merely contingent, they are inherent in the nature of things. The ‘good’ for Aristotle is that which all things aim at and the ‘good’ for humankind is happiness in the form of virtuous action. This is the true realization of human nature and all other conduct falls short of our true potential. The virtue or excellence of a human being is achieved through the maximization of the potentialities of our nature and as people are essentially rational creatures their ‘good’ is found in the activity of the soul in accordance with reason. Although Aristotle is offering a type of naturalism it is in no sense a reductionist argument because it enables the important difference between empirical reality and a sense of the ideal – this is a conceptual gap that is often relevant to the analyses and recommendations of cultural theorists.

In our search for origins an unlikely source but, I believe, a genuine one, is to be found in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Although he never invokes a concept of culture he does forcefully indicate the predisposition of human consciousness to the assimilation of the baggage of collective knowledge. Of course, Locke’s treatise is more familiarly known as a landmark in the history of British philosophy. It provides us with the tabula rasa, the empty bucket theory of mind, which, once united with Bishop Berkeley’s radical subjectivism and David Hume’s sceptical inductionism, sends us on the arid path to modern empiricism with its compulsive and dogmatic adhesion to the centrality of the senses. However, the critique of the a priori in the first book of Locke’s essay tells a second story. When he shows us that children and halfwits do not appear to conform to the rules of thinking and behaving that are supposedly ‘stamped upon the mind of men’, he is clearing the space for a knowledge that is pluralistic and diffused, but more locally, shared, learned and transmitted.

The thought of the eighteenth-century philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico was directly in line with the demands of the Enlightenment project. His New Science (1744) addressed itself wholeheartedly to the range of phenomena gathered by Pope’s dictum that ‘the proper study of mankind is man’. However, whereas the epistemological awakenings of the Enlightenment encouraged the study of human affairs through the objectivities and mechanicisms of the ‘hard’ sciences, Vico’s new science was clearly the precursor of social theory; it opted to investigate human ‘being’ in terms of its own symbolic creations. This investigation, or ‘philology’ as Vico referred to it, would look to what humankind had sedimented through its history, its mode of communication, its belief systems and its legal conventions. In short, many of Vico’s topics for empirical study we would today include as elements in our definition of culture. Although operating with a rationalist scepticism in the manner of René Descartes, who having employed the cogito to prove the existence of ‘self’ then pressed on to prove the existence of God and finally targeted ‘nature’, Vico’s goals were far less ambitious. He left the production and comprehension of nature to God and restricted the new science to knowing the knowable, namely, that which man himself had created; what we have come to call culture.

the world of civil society has certainly been made by men and its principles are therefore to be found within the modification of our own human mind.

Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of all things.

When men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, they attribute their own nature to them.

(Vico 1999)

It is not surprising given the content of these brief passages that certain forms of contemporary structuralism have traced their roots back to Vico also. However, our primary interest in such utterances is that Vico is speaking of the symbolic transformation of the ‘natural’ into the ‘cultural’. The history of human culture and civilization attests to the triumph of the inherent tendencies of the human constitution. Man has ceased to crawl and act like a wild beast because of the creative encoding of his species being. The New Science begins with a series of philosophical assertions on the basis of which human purpose, progress and cultural evolution are assured. They are redolent with a dynamism and a creative potential that humankind, it is argued, projects into that which is other than itself and therefore orders and tames it; the idea resonates with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s view on the practice and function of primitive cosmologies. The resonance amplifies when Vico next turns to an analysis of mythology in order to account human prehistory (itself a myth that prefigures all social theory in a variety of forms, from Durkheim’s ‘primitive hoard’, through Rousseau’s primitive but ‘gentle savage’, to Marx’s ‘primitive communism’). The outcome of this analysis is a theory of social en-culturation, that is, all societies must pass through three stages; the age of Gods, the age of Heroes and the age of Men (a gradient not essentially distant from Comte’s epistemological evolution from theology, through metaphysics to positivism). Corresponding to these three stages are three kinds of customs: belief systems, laws and commonwealths. The human persona transforms, in parallel, from ferocity, through pride into reason. This is surely an early parable concerning culture as the unfolding essence of human goodness.

The first clearly recognizable formulation of our concept of culture (at this stage without a name) is provided through the excavations of the anthropologist Marvin Harris into European philosophy. He reveals a succinct passage from the work of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot dated 1750 which states:

Possessor of a treasure of signs which he has the faculty of multiplying into infinity, he (man) is able to assure the retention of his acquired ideas, to communicate them to other men, and to transmit them to his successors as a constantly expanding heritage.

(Turgot quoted in Harris 1968: 14)

And this may prove to be a definition that it is hard to improve upon.

Jeremy Bentham’s writing in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) can be read as a treatise in amelioration, that is a well-meaning ethical foundation for the adjustment of the individual will to the onslaught and ravages of its times. As the exponentially reproductive processes and structures of industrialization began to produce for the population, so also did they produce at the expense of the population. The increasing availability of commodities on the market place of free enterprise was an idea easily offset by the concent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Author
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• Bibliography