Page 90 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

FROM WAYS OF LIFE TO LIFESTYLE

terrain for competing expectations. What is important is that the repertoire
exists as a resource at a number of levels (that is individual perceptions as well
as group prejudices as well as media stereotypes) simultaneously. It is in the
interplay and contrasts between these levels that culture becomes ambiguous;
something to be exploited in everyday life and not just used by ‘external’
analysts.
It may be objected that culture, at least in certain traditions of anthro-
pological theorizing (see, for example, Geertz 1973), has always been under-
stood as a symbolic repertoire. While this humanist interpretive tradition is
still a valuable guide to research practice, Geertz could assume that in village
societies the culture, or symbolic repertoire, was reasonably homogeneous and
the boundaries of culture and community were largely co-terminus. The nov-
elty I seek to describe is that not only are mass societies multicultural but the
repertoires are used in different ways in different institutional contexts. The
shift in the nature of the repertoire can be clari fied by situations when ‘trad-
itional’ cultures come into contact with the consumption of culture. When
Balinese village dancers perform a ceremony not at a traditional location or on
a traditional occasion but as a performance for tourists, or even more when
they tour Europe and North America staging theatrical performances, the
same symbolic event changes its meaning. It becomes a commodity, a source of
entertainment, maybe even spiritual enhancement, for anonymous audiences. It
becomes part of, or an element in, mass culture possibly appropriated randomly
or unpredictably.
If one left it there the conclusion would be that contemporary culture is
increasingly dominated by qualities of fragmentation and pastiche in ways that
are often condemned as the superficiality of postmodern life. In this account
the symbolism of Balinese religious traditions is able to be bracketed with the
symbolism of Irish drinking traditions in a virtual cultural supermarket. I will
go on to argue though that the burden of the supermarket metaphor is that, as
with everyday shopping where people do not buy goods at random but put
together distinctive sets of items, cultural choices are put together as styles.

Language and cultural symbolism
In order to bring out more fully what is involved in rethinking culture, I will
explore the idea of symbolic repertoires of cultural heterogeneity by turning to
an analogy between language and culture. I think it can be argued that
throughout the twentieth century theorists used a model of language as a way
of understanding how a culture ‘works’ although the relevance of language has
been understood in a number of quite different ways. I have previously sug-
gested (1996) that one can distinguish three main perspectives on how an
analogy with language can be used to interpret the use of symbols as cultural
artifacts. The first I have called symbolic exchange. From this perspective
symbols (including the words of a language) are initially seen as types of

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