Page 67 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

culture. However, this form of ‘left culturalism’ was also nation-centred in its
approach and there is little sense of either the globalizing character of contemporary
culture or the place of race within national cultures.
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Links Cultural materialism, culture, ethnography, experience, structuralism

Culture Culture is a complicated and contested word because the concept does not
represent an entity in an independent object world. Rather it is best thought of as
a mobile signifier that enables distinct and divergent ways of talking about human
activity for a variety of purposes. That is, the concept of culture is a tool that is of
more or less usefulness to us as a life form and its usage and meanings continue to
change as thinkers have hoped to ‘do’ different things with it.
The multitudinous ways that culture has been talked about within cultural
studies include culture as a whole way of life; as like a language; as constituted by
representation; as a tool; as practices; as artefacts; as spatial arrangements; as power;
as high or low; as mass and as popular. This variety of ways of comprehending
culture does not represent cases of objective right versus objective wrong, for none
of the definitions of culture is erroneous in the sense of mis-describing an object.
However, they do achieve different purposes and may be more or less applicable in
different times and places. The concept of culture is thus political and contingent
and to explore its meaning(s) is to trace its uses and the consequences that follow
from this. In so far as contemporary cultural studies has a distinguishing take on the
concept of culture, it is one that stresses the intersection of power and meaning
with a view to promoting social change and improving the human condition.
Raymond Williams has suggested that the word culture began as a noun of
process connected to growing crops, that is, cultivation. Having germinated from
the soil, the concept of culture grew to encompass human beings so that to be a
cultivated person was to be a cultured person. However, during the nineteenth
century it was apparent to the ‘cultured’ that not all persons were equally civilized.
At worst the capability to be cultured was held to be a product of natural selection,
at best it was a condition to be aspired to and acquired by, in practice, the educated
classes. Hence Matthew Arnold’s view that acquiring culture was the means toward
moral perfection and social good. Here culture as human ‘civilization’ is
counterpoised to the ‘anarchy’ of the ‘raw and uncultivated masses’. Later, the
English literary critic F.R. Leavis was to hold that high or literary culture, captured
in the artistic and scholarly tradition, kept alive and nurtured the ability to
discriminate between the best and the worst of culture; that is, between the canon
of good works and the ‘addictions’ and ‘distractions’ of mass culture.
By contrast, Raymond Williams utilized the spirit of a nineteenth-century
anthropological understanding of culture associated with Malinowski and Radcliffe-
Brown to designate culture as ‘a whole and distinctive way of life’. For Williams, it
was the meanings and practices of ordinary men and women that composed
culture. In this view, culture is constituted by the tapestry of texts, practices and
meanings generated by every one of us as we conduct our lives. The implication of
applying an anthropological understanding of culture to modern Western