Page 128 - Cultural Theory

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••• Zygmunt Bauman, Culture and Sociology •••

behaviour, in ritual, routine or in innovative form. This brings us to Bauman’s major
work in the field, Culture as Praxis.
Bauman begins from the premise that while there have been endless attempts
either to catalogue definitions of culture, or else to bring down new and final defin-
itions, what is really necessary here is typology. Bauman indicates three main fields
of discourse on culture. Bauman’s first field of discourse concerning culture is the
hierarchical: some people have more culture than others. Culture in this sense is
aligned to its oldest meaning, of cultivation, as in agriculture. The value conferred
upon cultivation, here, itself introduces the idea of value; some cultures are worth
more than others. This is the idea of culture as civilization, where as in Civilization
and its Discontents culture can also cut both ways. But this realm of culture can also
be viewed as a matter of personal development, self-cultivation or Bildung, develop-
ing endowments into talents, so that it also has a more democratic, or distinct note;
we cannot develop endowments that we do not have. The second field is anthropo-
logical, or historical – it pluralizes cultures, as travel or movement indicates is neces-
sary. The travelling idea of culture is classical: it opens with Herodotus, and the
observation of human difference. This field of usage may still be hierarchical, in the
way that it values, for here the silent ground of judging difference is the sense of ‘dif-
ferent to us’. Bauman’s third proposed field of culture is generic. Rather than observ-
ing difference, as in the second approach, the generic way of thinking presents the
reality of culture as its unity. We all do the same things – we are born, love, procre-
ate, eat, shit and die – only the way we carry out these cultural practices is different.
One way of thinking this difference in unity is via the work of Clifford Geertz,
though Bauman’s stronger attraction here is to the work of Lévi-Strauss. Culture,
however, is for Bauman a process, rather than a result. As he puts it here, ‘Structure …
is a less probable state than disorder’ (Bauman, 1973a: 54). Culture is what Bauman
calls the structuring activity; it represents the tension or struggle between freedom
and dependence.

The Structuring Activity

Culture as Praxis ([1973] 1999) is an interesting book to return to, three decades after
its first appearance. It is the only one of Bauman’s early English-language books to be
republished, in which Bauman revisits the field he himself tilled earlier. Bauman’s
Introduction to the Second Edition (1999) dusts off its references and authorities;
some cultural markers lose their significance over time. The nature of Bauman’s self-
reflexivity, however, is such as to make him wonder what is living and what is dead
in these pages. For culture is also defined by the fact that it recycles. Culture as Praxis
is itself part of our intellectual culture. Culture relies also on habit, or habitus; so that
what is innovative in one moment looks repetitive or merely habitual later. Yet
culture, as Bauman argues here, is often associated with the realm of freedom, as is
nature with the realm of necessity. The ambivalence of creativity is apparent. It is a

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