The theme of this book is a response to that of a far more famous one, published in 1869 by the English poet, educator and visionary, Matthew Arnold . Until comparatively recently Arnoldâs Culture and Anarchy was read by students of British society as among the most trenchantâcertainly the most influentialâof those high-minded works of exhortation and prophecy to which mid-to-late Victorian authors liked to treat their readers. For much of the twentieth century it also fed into current social and educational debate, influencing at a subliminal level generations of critics, social commentators and teachers. Subtitled âAn Essay in Political and Social Criticismâ, it portrays culture as a homogeneous and desirable quality. Culture for Arnold is âa study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.â1 More straightforwardly, in a later book, Literature and Dogma (1876), Arnold defined culture as âthe acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the worldâ.2
âMass cultureâ, âpopular cultureâ, let alone âpop cultureâ, would have been incomprehensible to Arnold . Indeed, though admirable in the abstract, culture was not, he reluctantly conceded, very popular in England. In reality the British people distrusted culture, since they associated it with intellectuality, which they hated in principle, and with what Arnold called âcuriosityâ. Not merely did curiosity kill the cat; according to Arnold it offended the average Britonâs sense of decency and moderation. âI have before nowâ, he wearily remarked in the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy, âpointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use the word [curiosity] in a good sense as well as a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.â
So culture had its enemies in Victorian England, typified for Arnold by materialism, provinciality and middle-class self-satisfaction: everything, in other words that in 1869 went along with British commercial and imperial success. Forces such as these Arnold associated, paradoxically for his time, with cultureâs adversary and opposite: anarchy. Culture as such had little to do with such homebred virtues or vices. The work ethicâor Hebraismâowed little to the thought impulse or Hellenism. Despite this, with some and intellectual effort, culture in Arnoldâs sense of the word could be acquired by an educated English personâby the whole country, did they but try. The English of all classes, Arnold thought, could do with a lot more of it.
Despiteâor more probably because ofâits improving zeal, the twenty-first-century reader is apt to find Arnoldâs celebrated book stuffy and smug. Anachronisms scream from every page. There is, for example, the question of his self-identification with a group called âweâ, denoting the British alone. There is also his talk of âforeignersâ, enviously though suspiciously viewed. What is more, Arnold seems to see âcultureâ as a quality that can be detached from other aspects of a community. Schooled by sociology, we are nowadays apprehensive of using the word in this strange, if uplifting, sense. Arnoldâs scenario, moreover, seems to us impossibly value-laden. There is in him too much talk of moral improvement and of âthings in the mindâ. Bodies, material artefacts, even money, seem to enjoy no place in his picture at all.
Most glaringly, for citizens of the so-called multicultural society, there is the fact that Arnold invariably uses âcultureâ as a singular noun. This is all the odder because the Romans, from whom we derive the word, tended to use it in the plural: culturae. It is tempting to think that Arnold saw culture as a singular quality because he was only aware of one: that of the British or English (in his book he uses the terms synonymously). Yet, as we have already seen, this was very far from being his view. If anything, âcultureâ for Arnold stemmed from overseas, though it might find a resting place in Britain. One might perhaps broaden the accusation by claiming that the âcultureâ he advocated was an exclusively European affair, that he saw Europe as a homogeneous unit with local variations that included âusâ and the âforeignersâ (that is, other Europeans), whilst sidelining other continents. Yet Arnold , like his headmaster father Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was steeped in the literature and history of the Near East; so he would have had a hard job fitting in even to this expanded stereotype. Arnoldâs âcultureâ is universal, cosmopolitan, elitist. Are there bridges from his ideas to our own?
The Meanings of Culture
So habituated have twenty-first-century people become to travel and comparative generalisations about different âculturesâ that it is difficult to register how recent the word is as used in our sense. In Roman times Cicero talks of two kinds of culturae: âagri culturaeâ, cultivations of the fields, and âanimi culturaeâ, cultivations of the spirit or mind. Accordingly, until the 1860s its use in most European languages was confined to agriculture, religion and by extension to education. The first English use as applied to crops in the general sense of âcultivating the soilâ is 1420. As applied to religious worship it is 1483, though the derivation is not from Latin culturae but from cultus, a cult or sect. Its extension to scholarship and training is a feature of the Renaissance. In 1510 Sir Thomas More talks of the need to apply ourselves âto the culture and profitâ of our minds, a sense not a thousand miles from Arnoldâs . By 1550 the word appears with this meaning in French. By 1626 the agricultural application has been extended to imply the cultivation of particular crops, from which we get the specialised uses âarboricultureâ, âfloricultureâ, âhorticultureâ and in France âvinicultureâ. Two years later the word embraced the athletic improvement of the human body. By 1796, at the height of Britainâs Agricultural Revolution, it is connected with the rearing of livestock.
Unsurprisingly, the shift to our modern analytical sense occurs in German. In 1860, with a little-known Zurich publisher, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt issued his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien; it had little impact at first, though it was later to transform scholarly thinking about the Quattrocento. That Renaissance Italy possessed a culture unique to itself, however, was a fresh insight. With it we approach the relativistic notion of one social, political and social organisation as distinct from others; for Burckhardt the Renaissance Italian state had been an unrepeatable âwork of artâ. To speak of a âcultureâ in this sense is close to talking of a âcivilisationâ; accordingly, when Burckhardtâs book was finally translated into English in 1878, it was as The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. By 1867, two years before Arnoldâs diatribe, the term âcultureâ was first used in a related sense in English. Significantly, the context is a description of that particular kind of cross-channel migration known as an âinvasionâ. After the Battle of Hastings, wrote Freeman in his history of The Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxons were confronted by âa language and a culture which was wholly alien to themâ.
From there it is but a short step to using the word in a scientific, quasi-objective sense, first attributed to that grandad of modern anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor . Tylor was a wealthy Quaker denied a university education because of his religious affiliation. Afflicted with tuberculosis, he instead travelled to Mexico, where he became fascinated by the parallels he could perceive between the customs, myths and rituals of the ordinary people he encountered in his progress and those of the European peasantry. Gradually the notion of culture as something multiform and spread out began to take shape in his mind. The result was a series of works tracing the deep affinities between people and times, the most famous of which, Primitive Culture of 1871, bore a title that seemingly engages with, and challenges, the exclusivity implied by Arnoldâs book, published a mere two years before.
On the first page Tylor hazards a new definition. âCulture or civilisation taken in its wide ethnographic senseâ, he opines, âis that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.â Like Arnold , Tylor always used âcultureâ as aâfrequently capitalisedâsingular noun, synonymous with its sister substantive âcivilizationâ. For Tylor , unlike Arnold , however, both culture and civilisation were diffused across the world, and across history. Each different society in different ages possessed a character of its own; yet beneath these apparent differences, certain constants were apparent. There was thus both a variety and a certain uniformity. Tylor goes on to dilate about this seeming paradox:
The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, 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. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future.3
The âlaws of human thoughtâ that Tylor identifies in this passage are those of social evolution cross-pollinated from Darwinâs biological theories with the study of society by later Victorians such as Herbert Spencer. For Tylor all societies had evolved, and were continually evolving, from stage to stage. Because all societies were on the same evolutionary journey, which they covered at different speeds, it was possible to compare them. The result was a method of analysis called the âcomparative methodâ, and a science that came to be known as Social Anthropology, the first chair of which in the University of Oxford Tylor came eventually to hold.
Yet Tylor says nothing about migration, for two very good reasons. The first is that, like most of the first few generations of anthropologists, he was interested in studying individual societies in situ so that he could observe the interplay in each case between social arrangements and their environment. It was therefore in his interests that each society appeared to stay still, just as a zoological specimen beneath the microscope ideally stays still. The second was that he was anxious to argue that the similarities he discerned between various societies in various places were the products of separate but parallel development, rather than of influence. If it could be proved that they had borrowed from one another, his argument was compromised, if not ruined.
By the mid-1870s, therefore, two contrasting senses of the term âcultureâ were available, both of which we have inherited: Arnoldâs , which stressed culture as an ideal that we might or might not attain; and Tylorâs , according to which all people possess a culture, albeit of different kinds. From Tylorâs comparative use of the singular noun, it was a fairly short step to pluralising it. By the turn of the century, the practice was commonplace. The modern cosmopolitan man, declared The Spectator on 27 June 1891, is one who prides himself on âspeaking all languages, knowing all cultures, living amongst all racesâ.
The Crux of Cosmopolitanism
The notion of cosmopolitanism features prominently in our title and is clearly going to be central to our discussion; again, it is a term whose application has shifted across time. Quite recently it has featured in the title of a stimulating book by the Ghanaian and British-born philosopher (currently resident in New York), Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah is the son of a marriage between an Ashanti noble, onetime Ghana nationalist politician, with a British author and artist, daughter of a former Socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer. I will be taking a closer look at his background in the conclusion to the present book, but wish to start by citing what he has to say in his work Cosmopolitism (2010) on the complex question of the meaning of culture. One of his chapters is headed âWhose culture is it anyway?â and it begins by addressing the fraught issues of âcultural patrimonyâ and âintellectual copyrightâ, both of which take their cue from conceptions of local, or else personal, belonging. In 1874, at the conclusion of the second British-Ashanti war, the state capital Kumasi was burned to the ground on the o...