Page 11 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 2

Contemporary Cultural Theory

worryingly ambiguous. When people think of an independent
national culture, they might well have in mind distinctive arts,
as embodied both in individual works and in institutions such
as art galleries and opera houses. But they might also be thinking
more generally about their distinctively national ways of doing
things: their cuisine and their eating habits, their religion and their
sports. To be ‘cultured’ might mean the ability to spot intertext-
ual references to T.S. Eliot; but it might also mean the capacity to
affect an ‘upper-class’ accent. ‘Multiculturalism’ might mean
more ‘immigrant’ literature in schools or more foreign films on
public television; but it might also mean significant modifications
to those distinctively national ways of doing things—curry as well
as fish and chips in England, or soccer instead of American or
Australian football. A ‘culture-led’ economic recovery probably
would have something to do with theatres, film production or
higher education; but it might also mean that people would be
persuaded to sell their way of life as a drawcard for the tourist
industry. As for cultural studies, for some it clearly means the
classics, fine arts and the high literary canon; for others it might
mean the sociology of adolescent gang warfare and the anthro-
pology of kinship. The problem is that we all mean a great deal
more than we know.

DEFINING CULTURE

Raymond Williams, the Welsh cultural theorist and late Professor
of Drama at Cambridge University, famously described ‘culture’
as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language’ (Williams, 1976, p. 76). That complexity is nowhere
more apparent than in his own attempts to define its usage. In
his first major work, Culture and Society 1780–1950, he drew atten-
tion to four important kinds of meaning that attach to the word:
an individual habit of mind; the state of intellectual development
of a whole society; the arts; and the whole way of life of a group
or people (Williams, 1963, p. 16). In the later Keywords, only the
latter three usages remained in play (Williams, 1976, p. 80). Later
still, his sociology textbook, Culture, reintroduced the first

2