culture - Martyn Hammersley · Web viewOut of this long and complex history three partially distinct meanings of the word ‘culture’ can be identified. The first treats culture

Martyn HammersleyCULTURE (Working draft)

'Culture' has long been recognised as a problematic term, and there have been many efforts to define it. However, it is frequently used today as if its meaning were clear and uncontested. Furthermore, it often seems to be employed in vague and inconsistent ways.

Some help in clarifying the meaning(s) of ‘culture’, and perhaps even in resolving the conceptual problems associated with it, can be gained by examining its history. Williams (1983:87) traces its origins to the Latin words ‘colere’ and ‘cultura’, a core meaning of which was ‘the tending of natural growth’, and by metaphorical extension this came to refer to the intellectual and moral development of human beings – perhaps with an ambiguity about the extent to which this needed to be actively induced. The notion of ‘cultivation’ is closely related, along with that of Bildung in the German context (Bruford 1975).

In much early usage the meaning of the word substantially overlapped with that of ‘civilisation’, but the latter term was also sometimes used as a contrast: in the nineteenth century there were influential writers who saw ‘culture’ as referring to what was being lost as a result of the advance of ‘industrial civilisation’. This reflected, in part, an opposition between literature and art, on the one hand, and the role of science and technology in underpinning industrialization, on the other. And this was often formulated as a contrast between organic growth and mechanical artificiality. Such a view was central to the thinking of Matthew Arnold – English poet, literary critic, and school inspector – whose work was a particularly important influence on the subsequent development of the concept of culture, and is discussed later.1 However, within anthropology the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ were treated as virtual synonyms in the nineteenth century – here the focus of investigation was the evolution of society from primitive to advanced stages.

1 The mechanical/organic contrast goes back at least to the writings of Herder. There have been important national differences within Europe over the past three centuries in the interpretations of, and the relative emphasis on, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’, as well as change in their meanings (see Kuper 1999:ch1). See also Leopold 1980ch6, Stocking 1987:ch1 and Elias 2000:chapter1, section II. The culture-civilisation contrast was particularly influential in German thought, but also in the context of English Romanticism which , as we shall see, informed Arnold’s conception of ‘Culture’.

1

An important tension within the meaning of the term ‘culture’ relates to whether it is singular or plural. In the nineteenth century it tended to be used in a singular form by cultural critics like Arnold, and also by anthropologists, despite the other differences in the meaning they gave to the term. However, even in the eighteenth century, Herder had recognised a plurality of cultures, and suggested that each must be understood in its own terms. Herder’s ideas were subsequently taken up in the Romantic movement, encouraging an emphasis on the value of ‘folk culture’ and of distinctive national cultures. Another important inheritor of Herder’s ideas was nineteenth-century German historicism (Iggers 1968; Beiser 2011). Even more significant was the ‘Völkerpsychologie’ of Steinthal and Lazarus, subsequently developed by Wundt (Kalmar 1987). Building on this, in the early twentieth century, especially under the influence of German anthropology (Stocking 1995; Penny and Bunzl 2003), social and cultural anthropologists in the US and the UK began to frame their discipline as concerned with studying ‘other cultures’, rather than focusing on the evolutionary development of ‘culture’.2

The term ‘culture’ was also important in German sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century, notably in the work of Simmel and of both Alfred and Max Weber. In this context one of the primary concerns was the distinctive culture of modernity and its consequences (see Loader 2015). The concept was of less significance in Anglo-American sociology and in the other social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century, but this changed in the second half, when social classes and ethnic groups often came to be seen as displaying distinctive cultures or ‘subcultures’ (Mintz 1956; Cohen 1958; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; CCCS 1972 and 1975; Hebdige 1979), or as representing counter-cultures (Yinger 1960, 1982, Miller and Riessman 1961, Willis 1977). Around the same time, in political science there was a growth of interest in what was referred to as ‘civic culture’ or ‘political culture’, this being treated as a key variable in explaining the stability of governments (see Almond and Verba 1963; Inglehart 1988). Meanwhile, in the sociology of organizations and management studies, the notion of ‘organisational cultures’ became very widely employed (see Smircich 1983). And this sense of the term, in particular, has come to be part of everyday usage, for example in declarations that the problem with some organization is one of culture, so

2 It is also worth noting that there is, of course, a plural conception of ‘civilisation’, whereby a variety of ancient civilisations are recognised, such as the Aztec, Inca, Egyptian, Sumerian, etc as well as the Graeco-Roman.

2

that ‘culture change’ is required. Finally, from the 1960s onwards, a whole new trans-disciplinary field – Cultural Studies – came to be established, which overlapped with, and rivaled, other social sciences, particularly sociology.3

Out of this long and complex history three partially distinct meanings of the word ‘culture’ can be identified. The first treats culture as singular. And it refers primarily to ideas, forms of literature, drama, art, and music that are judged to be especially valuable. Frequently, this is because they are seen as encouraging the development of intellectual and moral virtues; as contrasted with those forms regarded as worthless, or even as detrimental to intellectual and moral development. I will call this the aesthetic sense of the term, and I will capitalize its first letter when using the word in this way.

The second influential meaning of ‘culture’ also treats what it refers to as singular, as varying in degree, and as of positive value. However, in this usage, the term covers all aspects of life that are a product of learning and adaptation, rather than of biological inheritance. Different societies, historical and contemporary, are seen as possessing different degrees of culture, or as representing different stages of cultural development, so that they can be ranked in these terms: either in general or in specific aspects, such as in some aspect of technology. So, from this perspective, the culture of any society is, at least potentially, subject to evolution or development over time. Sometimes this is conceived in linear terms, sometimes as cyclical – for example with societies treated as going through phases analogous to childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.4 A different kind of sequential scheme is to be found in the work of Hegel and Marx. For them, cultures existing at different times in Europe are simply different aspects of a historical process of human development, each one representing a deformed version of human nature, but at the same time containing elements of its true form, with each being necessary for its eventual realization’.5 Even Marxists

3 More recently, Cultural Sociology has emerged as a named sub-discipline within sociology, with its own journals; influential figures such as Elias and Bourdieu have worked in this field. See also Williams’ (1981) concept of a sociology of culture, and McLennan’s (2006) argument for a ‘sociological cultural studies’. A small number of economists have also given attention to culture, as represented in Journal of Cultural Economics. There is also a Journal of Cultural Economy. 4 This can be traced back at least to Vico and Herder.5 Civilisations outside of Europe were treated by Marx as deviations from this pattern of development

that were caused by distinctive features of the local environment, notably the need for large-scale irrigation works if agriculture was to take place (see Wittfogel 1957). Marx was also elitist in that he regarded bourgeois society and culture as a more advanced form than feudal society, and than those various kinds of traditional culture to be found persisting in non-Western societies (Avineri 1968), a form of elitism was taken over by Vygotsky and Luria in their studies of Russian peasants, see Gielen

3

and critical researchers who have abandoned this meta-narrative nonetheless often adopt this sort of developmental conception of culture.

The third meaning of ‘culture’ is that which became central in the discipline of anthropology, and across social science, during the twentieth century and up to the present. Here culture is not treated as singular but as plural. However, as with the second meaning it refers to all of what human beings acquire through living in a particular society – as opposed to what they inherit biologically – rather than being restricted to ideas, art, literature and music. In short it relates to ways of life or modes of behavior in particular contexts, and to ideas only as they relate to these. Furthermore, at face value at least, this usage of the term is descriptive rather than evaluative, in the way that the other two meanings are.6.

The differences between these three senses of the term ‘culture’ highlight many of the important complexities surrounding usage of this word in social science, and it is therefore worthwhile examining the sources and character of each of them in more detail, before considering how the concept has been employed within Sociology and also in the field of Cultural Studies. As already noted, the first meaning is closely associated with nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural criticism; the second with the philosophy of history, early anthropology, and Marxism; and the third with twentieth century social and cultural anthropology, though it has spread to other social sciences as well.

Culture as aesthetic sensibility

Probably the most famous definition of ‘Culture’ in the English-speaking world was provided by Matthew Arnold. He declared that Culture consists of ‘the best that has been known and said in the world’ (1873:preface).7 The reference here is to literature and ideas, and in particular to those which were characteristic of the classical humanist tradition that developed in Europe after the Middle Ages, drawing on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Arnold treats Culture as a source of knowledge and understanding that is essential to living well: it embodies an ideal of the good life, and indicates

and Jeshmaridian 1999.6 However, while there is no recognition of varying degrees of culture, cultures tend to be treated as all

of value in their own terms.7 A similar notion, presented via the concept of civilization, developed in France, see Burke 1973.

4

how this can be realized in the face of a contingent world – ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.

Arnold has sometimes been seen as promoting the culture of a dominant elite or class (see, for example, Turner 1990:42 or McGuigan 1992:21). And it is true that something like the kind of Culture that he championed came to operate in this way in the early twentieth century. However, as will become clear, this does not fit closely with his perspective or intentions. Given that his position is frequently misrepresented, it requires attention here.

Arnold emphasizes the value of ideas and attitudes drawn from literature and the humanities as offering a higher form of understanding and appreciation that serves to develop character and virtue. As this indicates, a conception of the cultured person is implied, so that indirectly Culture relates to all aspects of a person’s life. Indeed, for Arnold, what was important about ‘the best that has been said and thought’ was that it facilitated a process of personal development that could, in principle, lead to what he refers to as ‘spiritual perfection’ (Arnold 1993:65 and passim). He contrasts the value of this with material wealth. So, discussing those whom he refers to as Philistines, Arnold writes: ‘Culture says: “Consider these people, […] their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”’. For Arnold, then, the focus of Culture is on the ancient question of what is a good life, and the virtues that contribute to, or are constitutive of, it.

Romanticism, as well as classical humanism, was a key influence on Arnold; in particular, a Romantic understanding of poetry, and of literature more generally, as having the capacity to go beyond the immediate appearance of the world, and therefore beyond the scope of science, lifting us above ‘lower’ desires to higher forms of enjoyment and better forms of human relationship. What was central here was the capacity of imagination to fuse perceptions and thoughts into recognition of a harmonious sense of the whole meaning of life. As Coleridge (1907:6) remarked, imagination can ‘awaken […] the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and direct […] it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an

5

inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequences of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand’. There is opposition here both to the world as represented by natural science, which is viewed as ‘inanimate and cold’, and to the method that produces this – on the grounds that it is not true to human life. And behind science, for Arnold and the Romantics, lay the ‘industrial civilisation’ that was transforming English society at the time (see Williams 1958). Thus, in effect, Arnold was putting forward a version of another ancient argument, this time about the need for virtue in citizens if a society and its members are to thrive, in the true sense of realizing human ideals rather than simply increasing material wealth. In this respect, like other influential figures at the time, he was reacting against key aspects of the contemporary society and those trends in political and religious thinking associated with them; though not in a simple reactionary fashion.

Thus, many of Arnold’s polemics were against the materialism and empiricism that he saw as increasingly influential at the time – for example in the form of utilitarianism and the ‘philosophical radicalism’ closely associated with it, alongside the growing commercialism of British society. He interpreted these as suggesting that human beings should be conceived as primarily, if not entirely, concerned with doing what they desired, with being happy, valuing whatever pleased them. At the same time, he also stood against religious tendencies of a Puritan kind that were, in his view, aesthetically deaf and blind as well as morally restricted. In both cases he was opposing what he saw as excessively narrow views of what is worthwhile in life, those which downplayed or even denied the value of literature and art, and the qualities that these cultivate.

While Arnold shared the widespread contemporary concern among the middle and upper classes about the growth of the urban industrial working classes, and the anarchy that their empowerment could bring about, he saw this danger as arising primarily from the kind of society that Britain had become: one in which Culture is not accorded its proper role. In effect, feudal habits of deference had been eroded, and while this was not undesirable in itself, there was nothing to replace these so as to preserve social unity. Thus, most of his essay on Culture and Anarchy is a reaction against what he sees as the rejection of Culture on utilitarian and/or religious grounds by politicians and intellectuals associated with the rising middle classes. He criticised them for their parochialism and self-satisfaction. At the

6

same time, in his essay on Equality he questioned the level of inequality in the distribution of property in nineteenth century Britain, and also argued that ‘an hereditary aristocracy, whatever its political achievements in the past, was ill-equipped to understand a modern world that was […] inevitably moving towards greater social equality’ (Collini 1993:x and xiii).

As this makes clear, Arnold acted as a cultural critic, in other words as a critic of the culture (or cultures) – in the anthropological sense of the term – that prevailed in Britain at the time he lived.8 As I noted earlier, his views have often been seen as elitist, and it is certainly true that he believed there was a superior form of cultural sensibility and that people varied considerably in the extent to which they had achieved this. He writes that ‘culture indefatigably tries not to make what each raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful and becoming and to get the raw person to like that’ (Arnold 1993:64). However, he did not believe that only an elite could achieve spiritual perfection, nor that Culture was currently concentrated in a single social class (he talks of ‘aliens’ within each social class who appreciate Culture); indeed his primary concern was to encourage its pursuit in all social classes. Furthermore, given that Culture had a moral function, providing the joy and consolation required in the face of the trials and disappointments of life, he believed that the state should play a key role in promoting, and spreading access to it – particularly through schooling. He saw this as desirable both because it enabled people to live more fulfilling lives and because it would contribute to social harmony.

Arnold argued that all established practices and beliefs should be scrutinised and judged by the highest standards, this requiring a degree of detachment or disinterestedness. What he meant by this was that things must be seen as they are, in their own terms, rather than according to whether they are ‘consistent with the true tenets of the Protestant religion, or supported a Whig or Tory view of the English constitution, or had an immediate bearing upon the great policy issues of the moment’ (Collini 1993:xvi). It was precisely the tendency to adopt these restricted perspectives that in Arnold’s view ‘narrowed and stultified the intellectual life of Victorian England’.

8 Of course, Arnold was only one among several influential cultural critics in nineteenth century Britain, Carlyle and Ruskin perhaps being the best known of the others (see Le Quesne 1982 and Landow 1985, respectively). Many of them were opposed to what they viewed as the de-humanising features of industrial society, emphasizing what had been lost from the past; though they differed both in what they took to be most significant ills of modern life, in the criteria of evaluation they employed, and in the models from the past on which these were based. See Collini 1991.

7

Arnold’s ideas, and the sources on which he drew, had considerable influence during the later nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, as I noted earlier, this idea of Culture served to define the identity of key segments of the upper and middle classes, and of those who aspired to this status. Moreover, to a large extent, it came to be institutionalized: through the education system in the UK, and by other means as well. Collini (1988:3) notes that ‘Arnold’s ideas have been invoked in justification of so many of those institutions which have contributed a distinctive, and often distinctively high, tone to the cultural life of modern Britain, such as the BBC, the British Council, and university departments of English’.9

A conception of Culture and its role that is similar, in many respects, to Arnold’s can be found in the work of twentieth century writers and literary critics like T. S. Eliot. I. A. Richards, and F. R. and Q. D, Leavis – though Eliot initially rejected Romanticism and the work of Arnold in particular (Loring 1935). All of these writers opposed what they saw as the negative spiritual consequences of industrial civilization and of the growing influence of science. At one point Frank Leavis (1930:3) quotes Richards (1926:60-1) to the effect that the critic of literature ‘is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. […]’. And in Leavis’s work there is an emphasis on the important role to be played by a cultural elite. In fact, he has less confidence than Arnold in the extent to which the bulk of the population of Britain could come to appreciate Culture. For example, in an influential pamphlet we find:

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgement. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response. The accepted valuations are a kind of paper currency based upon a very small proportion of gold. To the state of such a currency the possibilities of fine living at any time bear a close relation (Leavis 1930:3)

9 However, what was involved here was significantly different in content and spirit from the classical humanism that he espoused: Collini 1991:ch9.

8

Both Richards and the Leavises were closely associated with the rise of English Studies at Cambridge, and as part of this with developing a distinctive canon of good literature to which students should be introduced. This partly reflected the growth over the second half of the twentieth century of efforts to formulate and celebrate a body of ‘English literature’, alongside the emergence of the Oxford English Dictionary as a national institution.10 As Collini (1991:ch9) has pointed out this reflected a form of English or British nationalism, signalling the important link between culture and nationalism, alongside equally important connections to religion and notions of ethnicity.

For the Leavises, in particular, Culture was to be contrasted with the growing flood of commercial material aimed at a mass market: books, newspapers and magazines; Hollywood films; and ‘light entertainment’ radio and television. So, what is shared with Arnold, above all, is the view that literature and the arts have a moral function: they champion and inculcate certain virtues and forms of life that are at odds both with the leveling materialism of market forces and democracy, and with what was seen as the spiritually deadening influence of science and industrialism.11 For Leavis, great works of literature are ‘an antidote, now the only possible antidote, to the cheapening and corrupting of experience which the dominant forces of modern mass society conspired to promote’ (Collini 1993:xxxii), not least through the mass media. Industrial ‘civilisation’ was seen not only as failing to provide what humans need in spiritual terms but also as in fact degrading humanity, reducing human beings to machines or animals, emphasizing information and knowledge over true understanding and genuine feeling.12

The concept of culture in anthropology

The starting point for anthropological concern with culture was increasing recognition that there were societies outside of Europe that had very

10 Work on the development of a canon of English literature had already begun in the late nineteenth century, and Leavis’s version was at odds with the rather chauvinistic, conventional view, partly as a result of the influence of Modernism. Interestingly, Arnold was opposed to the setting up of English literature as a university discipline, believing that it should be located in the study of Classics: see Collini 1991:ch9.

11 These were, of course, themes in much nineteenth-century European thought, among conservatives and some liberals.

12 While Leavis had a post in an elite university, he felt marginal to it; and he was also at odds with the London literary scene. He saw his marginality as reflecting the effect of cultural corruption and decline.

9

different ways of life and beliefs from those that Europeans took for granted as normal.13 The existence of such societies had long been known, of course, but with the growth of European colonialism and missionary activity, and the increasing number of scientific expeditions to remote regions, greater information became available and new attitudes started to prevail – not least the desire to understand the reasons for the diversity.

Initially, in large part, the collection of data about these other societies was an amateur enterprise, carried out by travelers and missionaries, so that it was governed by diverse purposes, with little clear understanding of what was relevant, in what terms it should be described, how it should be conceptualized, etc. However, this changed with time, and, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, data started to come from trained observers and indeed from anthropologists themselves, as anthropology became established within some universities (see Stocking 1983). Their attempts to explain cultural diversity drew, to some degree, on ideas about the effects of geography and climate in producing very different forms of social life, but (in Britain, the USA, and France, especially) it rested above all upon a notion of social evolution: the idea that some contemporary non-European societies could be seen as living relics of social forms that had previously been dominant in the history of human life on earth, so that by studying them much could be learned about the early past of European society itself. This reflected the fact that at this time the discipline covered the physical as well as the social and cultural aspects of human beings, and was also closely associated with archaeology.

This evolutionary perspective (which preceded that of Darwin and differed from it in important respects) involved an evaluative framework, according to which there had been a growth of culture from the earliest ‘primitive’ communities, through what were labelled as ‘barbarian’ forms, leading eventually to the display of civilization in contemporary Europe. However, there were disagreements about the nature of this process, and

13 This was accompanied by growing awareness that the ways of life of people in the classical worlds of Greece and Rome, on which European culture drew, had been very different from those of modern Europe. It is important to note how the predominant meaning of the term ‘anthropology’ changed from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Originally, it referred to the investigation of human nature (particularly its mental aspects) in naturalistic terms, drawing on both theology and medicine. Underpinning this, often, were attempts to resolve the problem of Cartesian dualism. But in the nineteenth century, anthropology increasingly came to refer specifically to the study of ‘primitive’ societies, in order to trace the development of the mental and social characteristics taken to represent the highest form of civilization, exemplified by some features of Western European culture, notably science. See Hammersley 2016.

10

sometimes rejection of key aspects of it. Furthermore, there was a subordinate strand within Western thinking, dating back at least to Montaigne’s (1580) essay ‘Of Cannibals’, and fuelled particularly by Rousseau’s criticism of Western , and especially French, culture or civilisation, in which the emphasis was on what had been lost in the development of European societies, so that other cultures were seen as superior in significant respects. Closely related was the influence of ideas about the growth and decline of cultures, found for example in the work of Vico and Montesquieu (Stocking 1987:13-14). But most influential of all as a counter to evolutionism was German anthropological work in the second half of the nineteenth century which, much more than that in other countries, was shaped by Herder’s emphasis on the diversity of cultures, this leading to a rejection of any simple evolutionary progressivism (Stocking 1995; Penny and Bunzl 2003).14 Also important here were methodological arguments, in particular distrust of evidence about the pre-history of European societies, and about the pasts of currently existing ‘primitive’ societies. It was argued that the focus of anthropology should be on the current operation of these societies, for what they can tell us about diverse forms of social organization and culture.

It is, of course, significant that anthropology developed during a period when several European societies had established or were establishing colonial empires, and the work of anthropologists came later to be sponsored by some Western governments because it was believed to provide an important resource in colonial administration. This certainly influenced the attitudes and work of many anthropologists, even if there were tensions and conflicts.15 In Britain, one reason for this was probably that by the early twentieth century anthropologists had begun to abandon the previously dominant evolutionary framework, in favour of diffusionism and later functionalism, both of these theoretical trends encouraging a stance of cultural relativism: treating different cultures as unique configurations of traits or as distinctive social systems, rather than as representing different stages of human development. And this was at odds with colonial ideology, in terms of which Western colonizers saw themselves as representing an advanced form of civilization, which had a right, or even an obligation, to ‘civilise’ the rest of the world.

14 Herder’s views were complex, and they changed over time: within them can be found both evolutionary and relativist elements. On Herder, see Zammito 2002; Forster 2010; Beiser 2011:ch3.

15 From the start the relationship was by no means straightforward: see Kuper 1999:ch4. In the German context it has been argued that colonialism had little effect on late nineteenth-century anthropology: Penny and Bunzl 2003.

11

An early and very influential anthropological definition of ‘culture’ was that provided by the nineteenth century English anthropologist Edward Tylor. For him, the word referred to ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor 1871:1). There has been disagreement about how closely Tylor’s definition relates to later anthropological usage (Stocking 1968:ch4, 1987; Leopold 1980), but while there are certainly important differences, it does indicate key features of what came to be taken as the anthropological conception of culture, even if only in embryonic form.16

First of all, Tylor’s definition emphasizes that culture is ‘acquired as a member of society’, rather than through biological inheritance.17 Another contrast here is with the differences that are to be found amongst individual people as regards abilities, skills, temperament, personality, etc, which started to be explored by psychologists at the time Tylor was writing. Such contrasts highlight some of the key boundaries around the discipline of anthropology, and also important limits to what is covered by the term ‘culture’; even though these have sometimes been challenged or eroded.

Secondly, Tylor’s definition of ‘culture’ is comprehensive in covering not just literature, art, and ideas but also ‘morals’, ‘law’, customary or habitual behavior, and technologies. In effect, virtually all aspects of human social life are included in the definition. As noted earlier, this broad focus has been a characteristic feature of most twentieth-century social and cultural anthropology. Moreover, while there has been a tendency to treat some aspects of culture as more important than others, this has rarely involved a prioritization of literature and philosophy, not least because, typically, most anthropologists studied non-literate societies, at least up to the middle of the twentieth century. Instead, in much functionalist anthropology there was a tendency to emphasise the key role played by norms and values, along with myths and rituals, in maintaining social cohesion. Later, along slightly different lines, cultures came to be conceptualized by some anthropologists as symbolic systems. One result

16 On the differences between Tylor’s approach and that of later anthropologists, see Stocking 1987:302. Of course, it is misleading to assume that twentieth-century anthropology shared a single concept of culture, but I will adopt this fiction for the moment.

17 In fact, in the nineteenth century there was a frequent tendency to conflate culture with race, biological inheritance often being seen as including ‘acquired characteristics’ learned by people in the course of their lives (Burrow 2000).

12

was the cognitive anthropology developed in the United States by Goodenough, Frake, and others; alongside a parallel development in France, drawing on a different tradition of structuralism, represented by the work of Lévi-Strauss. Other anthropologists, while retaining the idea of culture as a symbolic system, drew on hermeneutics to present the use of cultural symbols in human social action as fluid and performative rather than determined by some underlying structure, the most influential example being Geertz (see Kuper 1999:Intro).

Another historically significant feature of Tylor’s definition is that it treats culture as a ‘whole’, suggesting that the different elements included under the heading of culture shape one another; though in practice Tylor tended to focus on the development of particular cultural traits (Stocking 1968:80-1). Such holism in the context of studying particular cultures, rather than culture in the singular, came to be given great emphasis with the development of functionalism, in the work of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and also in the ‘culture and personality’ school of Benedict and Mead. Here, cultures were seen as integrated or organic systems, and it was insisted that they had to be studied as such (Kuper 1999:ch2).18

Tylor’s definition displays interesting similarities to and differences from the concept of Culture employed by Arnold at around the same time. Both used the term in a singular form, and treated what it refers to as having universal social significance. However, Tylor and other nineteenth-century anthropologists assumed long-term progress out of ‘primitive’ beginnings, whereas Arnold looks back to the seventeenth century as the high point in the development of Culture, this being followed by decline, particularly in Britain, as a result of commercialism and industrialisation. Furthermore, Arnold was explicitly engaged in cultural criticism of his own society, whereas Tylor was concerned to document and understand the diverse forms that human social life takes, and the beliefs and practices associated with these, albeit in terms of development towards Western civilization.

While twentieth-century anthropologists have varied in some significant ways as regards what sense they have given to the term ‘culture’, and what role they have assigned it in their analyses, they have generally treated it as a product of social innovation and learning, and have emphasized the importance of values, norms, and beliefs expressed in

18 Kalmar 1987 shows that many of these features were also characteristic of the concept of Volksgeist developed by Lazarus and Steinthal.

13

symbolic forms (Gamst and Norbeck 1976:6 and passim). The focus of their research has been on documenting the variability of culture, understood in these terms, to be found across geographical locations, and how this has been influenced by, and shapes, social life.19 However, with the increasing impact of Western societies on other cultures, and the effects of urbanization in the Third World, anthropologists also started to give attention to the phenomenon of ‘culture contact’, so that there was greater emphasis on cultural borrowing among groups and on the adaptation of cultural practices to new circumstances. Furthermore, many anthropologists began to carry out research within Western societies, studying significant forms of cultural variation within these, whether contrasting the rural with the urban or examining the cultural adaptations of ethnic minority groups. Running through social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century, though, are not only different conceptualisations of ‘culture’, but also different weightings given to this concept as against those of ‘social organisation’ and ‘structure’. This was true not just of those influenced by Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism but also of anthropological work shaped by Marxism, where the relative weight of cultural and ‘material’ factors was often highlighted.

Culture and sociology

The ‘anthropological’ concept of culture came to be adopted by many sociologists and other social scientists in the second half of the twentieth century; and, as a result, the concept underwent further reinterpretation and modification. One aspect of this in Anglo-American sociology, mentioned earlier, was the identification of subcultures and counter-cultures within large, complex societies. In particular, there was a concern with the distinctive beliefs, values, attitudes, etc of groups that are subordinated or marginalized within these societies, one interest being in how subcultures can block social participation or social mobility. Very often, this was conceptualized as the effect of a clash between the cultural orientation of the marginal group and that of the dominant culture (see, for example, Miller 1958).

19 However, there was also a small but influential group of US anthropologists in the 1950s and 60s who revived the notion of cultural evolution (see for example Steward 1955; White 1959, Sahlins and Service 1960). However, most anthropologists sought to abstain from evaluating the cultural phenomena they sought to understand, or at least from any negative evaluations. For an infamous exception see Turnbull 1972, who dedicated his book to the people he studied as follows: ‘To the Ik, whom I learned not to hate’. See also Beidelman 1973, Heine 1985, and Knight 1994.

14

Use of the concept of culture or subculture to understand the behavior of subordinate or marginalized groups also sometimes involved negative evaluation of the culture concerned. A classic example of this is Lewis’s (1959) concept of ‘the culture of poverty’: he saw this culture as keeping some groups in poverty even when structural conditions had changed, thereby in principle allowing them to improve their standard of living. While Lewis was an anthropologist, this concept was taken up much more widely in sociology and psychology along with associated ideas like ‘cultural deprivation’. At the same time, this line of analysis was sharply criticized on the grounds that all cultures should be respected and/or that it involved blaming the victims of inequality by underestimating the role of structural and situational factors.20

There has also been some sociological work focusing on elite or dominant class cultures. While in some respects this too amounts to a concern with a particular type of subculture, albeit one that is in the ‘centre’ rather than at the periphery of society, emphasis in this work has often been on the way in which the aesthetic and other preferences of this dominant class or elite have been imposed on society as a whole. Involved here is a kind of mirror image of Arnold’s perspective: the content focused on is similar – ‘high culture’ in the sense of literature, philosophy, and the arts – but a different evaluation is involved: the primary concern is with how these serve to reproduce a class-divided society.

One of the most influential versions of this perspective in recent times has been the work of Bourdieu. He treats what is of value within a society as arbitrary, in the sense that it does not derive from any intrinsic or transcendent source of value. Rather, value is seen as entirely an effect of the exercise of power, a dominant group determining what counts as valuable and formulating its value in ideological terms. He presents social class differences in school performance, and in the obtaining of educational credentials, and thereby in occupational destinations, as operating through differences in ‘cultural capital’ available to children from different class backgrounds – differences in the cognitive and other educationally-relevant resources inherited or inculcated in homes. Those who possess this capital

20 It is important to note that Lewis worked with a conception of society that was strongly influenced by the work of Marx, and certainly did not deny the role of structural conditions, though some who took over the culture of poverty concept focused primarily on what they took to be the cultural and psychological causes of poverty.

15

tend to have much higher levels of educational achievement than those with low levels of it, since they experience continuity between home and school where others face discontinuity, lacking what is required. In this way, the culture of the dominant elite or class serves to subordinate other classes and groups. So, in this context, Culture is evaluated negatively, because of its role in reproducing the class structure and social injustice.21

As noted earlier, the idea of culture also came to be used in the study of organisations, generating a considerable literature on ‘organisational cultures’. This built on earlier work that had distinguished between the formal structures of organisations, these marking out the official distribution of authority and responsibility, and the somewhat different informal patterns that usually develop within organizations, often involving an at least partially discrepant distribution of power: actors apparently in positions of authority often being impotent in important respects, while some low status positions exercise considerable power, especially in terms of veto or redirection. These informal patterns came to be seen as resulting from the development over time of local cultures among members of an organization, or within particular parts of it, that were at odds with the formal structure of authority. These cultures were sometimes seen as essential to the organisation’s operation, but they could also be viewed as a source of dysfunctionality or resistance (see, for example, Gouldner 1964).

The significance of Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies emerged, from the 1960s onwards, as a newly named field that straddled the humanities and the social sciences. It was concerned with ‘popular culture’ (Bennett et al 1986; Parker 2011) – a term whose denotation is similar in many respects to what had previously been referred to as ‘mass culture’ (Rosenberg and White 1957); though these two terms are frequently taken to have very different connotations. So, much of the focus of Cultural Studies came to be on the forms of entertainment provided by the mass media, and their reception and use by audiences, as well as on the music and literature distinctive to specific groups, for example particular social classes or youth subcultures.

21 However, it should be noted that there has long been a competing strand in Anglo-American sociology of education which argues that social inequalities arise not from the imposition of an alien culture on working-class and ethnic minority children but from a failure of the education system to provide them with equal access to the knowledge and skills to which they are entitled (see, for example, Young 2008).

16

The term ‘popular culture’ carries several conflicting meanings. Sometimes it refers to cultural forms that are aimed at and engaged with by broad sections of the populace. Much of this takes the form of commercially produced entertainments, from ‘bestselling’ books and magazines to soap operas on television or popular films. However, the term is sometimes used in a rather different way to refer to what is produced by ordinary people, thereby overlapping somewhat with the notion of ‘folk culture’. This may seem to exclude much of what is commercially produced, but it is often argued that commercial forms are produced with an eye and ear to what will be found interesting and engaging by the populace, therefore drawing on the preferences and even ideas of ordinary people, and that this material is never simply passively consumed but is to some degree appropriated and ‘popularised’ in the process.

The development of Cultural Studies derived initially from a broadening of concern on the part of scholars in the field of English literature to take in working class forms of literature, music and art – treating them as of value, alongside elite cultural materials. And later it came to involve a negation or reversal of the evaluative framework underpinning the aesthetic sense of the term ‘Culture’. Where the Leavises and many other commentators had treated mass or popular culture as undermining civilized forms of life, the attitude of cultural studies writers in the 1970s and 80s was very different. Indeed, they sometimes adopted a thoroughly positive attitude towards such cultural forms, and certainly insisted that they should be studied in their own terms not simply evaluated negatively or dismissed. In other words, the hierarchy of cultural activities and products adopted by Arnold and Leavis was rejected or even inverted.

In some respects this reflected a process of socio-cultural change. The value given to Culture in the first half of the twentieth century was never entirely uncontested, with distinctions like ‘high-brow’ and ‘low brow’, or ‘serious’ versus ‘light’, often being used with contrasting inflections. And, after the middle of the twentieth century, the role of Culture as a status symbol in society began to decline. This did not, of course, mean that literature, music, and art were no longer used in marking social status.22 But taste became more diverse, and was often closely tied to particular culturally-defined identities, sometimes as part of fashion changes or

22 Nor does culture exhaust all of the means that are used to establish such distinctions: on which see Daloz 2010.

17

subcultural movements. This reflected an important cultural shift (Martin 1981), the result being a much more complex patterning of taste than was characteristic of British society at the beginning of the century (Bennett et al 2009). This was a development that had already been noted by some commentators in the US in the 1950s and 60s. For example, Bell (1965:ch1) had emphasised the extent to which there had been a differentiation of taste amongst the burgeoning middle classes, as well as increased enjoyment of multiple forms of cultural production.

So, growth in the number and proportion of the population made up by the middle classes (those employed, or related to someone employed, in white collar, administrative, or professional occupations) was an important factor. Another was increasing affluence even among some sectors of the working class. This affluence expanded the markets for goods and services of various kinds. Of particular importance for Cultural Studies was the growth in disposable income available to young people and even children, both directly and through their influence on parents. Also important was a gradual change in the age structure of western societies, and an associated change in attitudes, from a tendency for teenagers and young adults to be primarily concerned with entry into adult society, towards a stronger sense of generational differences, often marked by subcultural fashions, these frequently being exploited by advertisers.23 These changes formed an important background to the emergence of Cultural Studies.

In some respects, Cultural Studies writers simply applied the anthropological conception of culture to contemporary Western societies.24 For example, Willis (1979:185) defines ‘culture’ as ‘the very material of our daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings’. However, it is important to recognise that, in its early stages at least, Cultural Studies was strongly influenced by the tradition of cultural criticism exemplified by Arnold and the Leavises, via the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.

Hoggart and Williams started from the aesthetic concept of Culture, but also transformed it in important respects. For example, where the

23 While the 1950s seem to have been a pivotal moment in the development of youth subcultures and their popular recognition, this process of increasing generational division had developed over several decades prior to this, but that period was a time in which young people had disposable income and used it, and thereby attracted the attention of commercial enterprises.

24 This had also been done by the community studies movement; and, indeed, an increasing amount of anthropological work later came to be focused on Western societies.

18

Leavises had looked back to an organic form of society that had been destroyed by capitalism, and sought to preserve the tradition it had developed as a remedy for the ills that now prevailed, Hoggart and Williams pointed to the working class cultures in which they had been brought up – in Yorkshire and Wales, respectively – as embodying those lost ideals, and therefore as offering a living source from which the necessary rejuvenation of social and cultural life could draw.

While these two authors shared this broad commitment, their work was different in character. In his book The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart (1957) sought to document working-class culture, in a manner analogous to a sociological community study, but primarily on the basis of his own experience of being brought up in Leeds. However, he also focused on the damage that was being done to this culture by commercial mass media and other forms of institutional change. By contrast, in Culture and Society Williams (1958) traced the history of the tradition of thought that had placed emphasis on the importance of Culture in the face of growing commercialism and industrialisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And he highlighted the potential contribution of working-class radicalism and its institutions to the development of a common culture attuned to changing economic and political conditions.25 In an early influential essay Williams wrote:

There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value – not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed by the great working-class political and industrial institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society.

However, it is important to recognize that, like Arnold and the Leavises, Williams and Hoggart were still concerned with distinguishing what is of higher and lower quality in literature and the arts. And, like their predecessors, they saw this as important because it relates to how well people live, and to how their lives can become better. Moreover, while these authors argued that there were valuable features to be found within

25 In fact, Frank Leavis was not blind to this. For example in his Introduction to Mill’s essays on Bentham and Coleridge, he suggests that Arnold’s characterisation of the middle classes as philistine and of working class communities as barbarian is a ‘simplification’ of the actual concrete complexities. His source for this is Beatrice Webb’s autobiography, and her description of the community life of her working-class cousins in a Northern Mill town (Leavis 1950:21).

19

traditional working class culture, they were not championing this over the dominant culture. Indeed, the superiority of much of what is available in the latter was recognized. Thus, Williams writes:

At home we met and made music, listened to it, recited and listened to poems, valued fine language. I have heard better music and better poetry since; there is the world to draw on. But I know, from the most ordinary experience, that the interest is there, the capacity is there.

Furthermore, he denies that the dominant culture is simply the product and possession of the dominant social class, insisting that:

A great part of the English way of life, and of its arts and learning, is not bourgeois in any discoverable sense. There are institutions and common meanings, which are in no sense the sole product of the commercial middle class; and there are art and learning, a common English inheritance produced by many kinds of men, including many who hated the very class and system which now take pride in consuming it.

Even more surprisingly, perhaps, he acknowledges that:

The bourgeoisie has given us much, including a narrow but real system of morality; that is at least better than its court predecessors. The leisure which the bourgeoisie attained has given us much of cultural value.

To repeat the point, neither Hoggart nor Williams were championing working class culture against Culture. Moreover, in these writers’ work there is still a conception of social life in which literature and the arts are seen as playing a central role in people’s lives. Like Arnold, Williams saw education as civilizing, so that restricted access to it was a form of deprivation: not cultural deprivation in the sense of being deprived of all culture, but deprivation of the wider experience of cultural works to which all should be entitled because it facilitates personal and social development (Williams 1961).

It is important to note that there is a complex relationship involved here between at least three elements: local working class cultures, Culture, and the commercial orientation of bourgeois society and the ‘mass culture’ it

20

produces. What Williams and Hoggart objected to was barriers being put up between elite and working class culture, not to any hierarchy of evaluation in itself. Indeed, they both make negative judgments about much of the ‘culture’ of contemporary British society. And, in substantive terms, their evaluations here are still quite close in character to those of Leavis, Arnold, and the Romantics. They are very much opposed to a cultural populism that would erode or reverse the hierarchy assumed by this tradition. This implies that they were still operating with a concept of Culture, though certainly not one that treats it as the property of an elite or of a single class. Also, like Arnold and Leavis, they see developments within bourgeois society as threatening Culture, including, or especially, as it is manifested in working-class communities, and thereby undermining what is necessary for good living.

It is important to underline these parallels with the position of Arnold and Leavis because, within the field of Cultural Studies, there is a common misreading of their work, particularly that of Williams.26 For example, McGuigan (1992:21) describes the essay from which I have just been quoting as ‘a clear and concise rebuttal of what, for purposes of brevity, can be labeled “elitist” conceptions of culture’. Yet, as I have indicated, even though Williams rejects any sharp contrast between elite and working class culture, his concern was still with making ‘the best that has been thought or known in the world current everywhere’ (Arnold 1993:79). This goes alongside his celebration of key features of working-class culture, rather than standing in opposition to it. Much the same is true of Hoggart. And neither of these writers simply adopted the anthropological conception of culture. Nevertheless, their work came to be seen as foundational for British Cultural Studies, in which rather different modes of evaluation operated.

An important shift in the development of this field was marked by the publication of Hall and Whannel’s (1964) book The Popular Arts. While building on the work of Hoggart and Williams, these authors resisted their tendency to see popular, commercially produced cultural forms simply as products of capitalism and as undermining Culture. They argued instead for recognition of different cultural genres, including those with popular mass appeal, and insisted that these should be treated as of value in their own terms (pp36-8). Nevertheless, they emphasised that within genres evaluations can and should be made. An example is their claim that Adam

26 One aspect of this has been a tendency to exaggerate the differences between these two writers. For Williams’ own view of the differences see Williams 1957. See also Hoggart and Williams 1960.

21

Faith ‘as a singer of popular songs’ is ‘by any serious standards far down the list’ (Hall and Whannel 1964:28).

As I indicated, later work in Cultural Studies took this weakening of the aesthetic hierarchy further, either suspending any concern with the ‘quality’ of cultural products or sometimes even celebrating the value of popular forms of commercially-produced entertainments, such as soap operas; precisely those forms that Leavis, and Williams and Hoggart, had deplored. In other words they reversed the previously accepted hierarchy, leading to an implicit or explicit de-valuing of what had come to be treated as ‘elite culture’. Furthermore, where Hoggart and Williams had treated mass culture as an external force eroding working class culture, many writers in Cultural Studies emphasized how it had increasingly come to inform many people’s everyday interpretations of their lives: to one degree or another, most of us draw on films and television programmes to make sense of our own experience, in much the same way that people use literature of various kinds.

Another major influence on the development of Cultural Studies, one that was evident in the work of both Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, was Marxism. Of course, by the middle of the twentieth century, this was a heterogeneous and internally conflictual ‘tradition’. The conflicts were not just between Stalinist orthodoxy and Trotskyism but also between both of these and various kinds of Western Marxism, such as those developed by Lukacs and Korsch, by the Critical Theorists of Frankfurt, by Gramsci, by Sartre, and by Althusser and his students, these all differing from one another in significant respects. Not surprisingly given this, Marxism did not provide a single perspective on the character or function of culture. Even those Marxists who accorded it a central social role, as against those who placed emphasis entirely on ‘material factors’ in shaping social life, differed in their evaluations. There were Marxists who emphasized the role of culture as sustaining bourgeois hegemony but also those who saw it as representing a means of resistance to that hegemony.27 While many European Marxists in the early twentieth century shared a negative evaluation of popular culture, some later Marxists adopted a more positive attitude towards it (see, for example, Swingewood 1977).

27 There were also conflicting attitudes of Marxists towards the rise of modernist forms of literature and art in the early twentieth century (Adorno et al 1980). Some, like Lukacs, condemned modernism, in favour of more traditional forms, while others, such as Bloch, saw it as playing an important progressive role.

22

As in the case of sociological research, there came to be a focus on the role of the mass media, and the cultural products they promote, in reproducing social class, ethnic, and gender inequalities.28 However, this was not usually seen as an entirely determinate process: as noted earlier, there was often an emphasis on the extent to which mass media products draw on elements from working class and ethnic minority cultures, and also on the ways in which these are re-interpreted, and used in non-standard ways, this often being taken by Cultural Studies writers to represent resistance to the socio-political status quo.

So, under the influence of Marxism, a significant strand of work in Cultural Studies became concerned with investigating the ideological role of commercial cultural products aimed at a mass market. This clearly challenged the tendency to valorize popular culture, also to be found in Cultural Studies, this being dismissed as a fallacious form of political radicalism. For example, McGuigan (1992:6) points out that ‘the uncritical endorsement of popular taste and pleasure, from an entirely hermeneutic perspective, is curiously consistent with economic liberalism’s concept of “consumer sovereignty” […]’. It is important to underline, though, how underpinning this line of argument was a developmental conception of culture (the second sense of the term I outlined earlier), where different types of culture were seen as reflecting stages of social development, and sometimes as obstructing or facilitating progress from one to another.

While at odds with any such developmentalism, the writings of Barthes proved seminal for studying the ideological role of mass culture. He provided a semiotic method of analysis that was taken up and developed by Anglo-American Cultural Studies researchers, notably by Hall and his associates. In his own work, Barthes focused on the way in which, via the connotations of words and images, various aspects of popular culture – from newspaper pictures to wrestling matches – served to convey messages that reinforced dominant French bourgeois culture.

At the same time, there was also often an insistence that audiences do not passively receive and internalise media messages, indeed it was emphasized that they sometimes resist or redirect the ideological messages purveyed. A balancing act was involved here, as in much other Marxist and

28 However there is an argument to be made that they actually reduced cultural differences amongst the social classes: see Bell 1965.

23

sociological work, between acknowledging the ideological role of the media while yet denying that these can simply imprint attitudes on audiences. In other words, the central theme was that social reproduction takes place in and through cultural processes, but that it is not free of contradictions, and indeed that these provide scope for progressive cultural politics.

Within Cultural Studies, a contrast has often been drawn between, on the one hand, the ‘culturalism’ of Williams and Hoggart (and also of later writers carrying out ethnographic and other studies of youth culture, such as Willis), and, on the other hand, the ‘structuralism’ of those studying popular cultural products, drawing on the semiotics of Barthes and others. However, both these traditions operated within a set of assumptions that marked the work produced off from the early writings of Williams, Hoggart, Hall and Whannel – despite the fact that Hall was a key figure in these developments (Hall 1980).

Another important influence on the development of Cultural Studies, as for many other fields in the late 1970s and 1980s and subsequently, was the development of ‘new social movements’, this label indicating their difference from the more traditional class-based variety. Of particular importance in terms of its impact here was feminist work, but also significant were anti-racist, and gay and lesbian, activist movements. These reinforced many of the political commitments underpinning Cultural Studies, but also changed them in key respects, forcing the need to find broader formulations of the character a radical perspective should take. Hall (1992:281) argues that the project in which the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was engaged was the production of organic intellectuals, on the model of Gramsci. However, this was hampered not just by changes in the social class structure and the splintering of leftist political groupings, but also by the emergence of the new social movements, whose activists generally resisted any reduction of their struggle to a concern with overthrowing capitalism. What emerged was a wider range of oppositional movements, some of them desiring a completely new society, but one whose character necessarily remained rather vague. In the context of specific struggles, tensions necessarily arose amongst the various groupings on the Left. More or less at the same time that this was happening, the forces of the Right gained in power and influence, especially in the UK. One strand of this promoted a traditional view of Culture (see Cox and Dyson 1971), but an even more influential one championed ‘the economic logic of the market’, precisely the sort of philistinism that Arnold, Leavis, and others had

24

challenged.

Within this conflicted field, the meanings given to the term ‘culture’ often blurred together an aesthetic focus on art works with the anthropological sense of the term as referring to a whole way of life, but in a manner rather different from both Arnold and the anthropologists. An example would be Hebdige’s (1979) study of the aesthetic dimensions of youth subcultures. Here any distinction between professional art production and the cultural activities of ordinary people, especially young people, was broken down.29

The Cultural Studies field that emerged from the confluence of all these influences was, not surprisingly, heterogeneous. Indeed, to a large degree it was united only by what it rejected: what was seen as the elitism of Arnold and Leavis, on one side, and the reductionism and determinism of orthodox Marxism, on the other. In place of these there emerged analyses of popular forms of culture that, while often emphasising the role of capitalist commercialism, also insisted on the originating sources of creativity that underlie these forms, and while distanced from any orthodox conception of Marxist processes of development, and even more from an exclusive emphasis on social class divisions, nevertheless explicitly opposed capitalism, and its associated imperialism (as well as patriarchy, racism, and homophobia), emphasising potential sources of resistance and transformation.

Problems with the concept of culture

As we have seen, the concept of culture has had a complex history. The aesthetic sense of the term, the first of the three senses I identified, formed part of a critique of prevalent attitudes in nineteenth-century British society. It was used to identify the kinds of knowledge and appreciative capacities to which all people should aspire. As I noted, it came out of a conception of what a good life for a human being is; this, in many ways, following on from, or indeed lying alongside, religious ideas and commitments. And central to it was evaluation of forms of literature, art, etc, and the beliefs and attitudes associated with them. However, later, Culture came to be criticized,

29 Of course, much of modern art in the twentieth century challenged the very notion of art as a distinctive type of product, albeit relying upon this notion for commercial purposes. This is closely related to the questioning of distinctions between higher and lower forms of literature or of music.

25

both by sociologists and by Cultural Studies writers, on the grounds that it functioned as a dominant class culture that reproduced social inequality through legitimating it. And within Cultural Studies, ‘popular culture’ was celebrated or its various forms were assessed as regards their politically progressive character and/or effects.

By contrast, anthropologists were primarily concerned with describing and explaining the different ways of life, beliefs, and technologies as well as kinds of art and music, etc to be found in non-Western societies. Here, ‘culture’ was defined in broad, rather than specifically aesthetic, terms. Initially, the framework was an evolutionary conception of the growth of civilization; employing what I have referred to as a developmental model of culture, a concept also to be found, albeit in somewhat different form, in Marxism. And this still retained an evaluative dimension. In twentieth century anthropology, a suspension of evaluation was adopted as a means of facilitating the understanding of ‘other cultures’, though it was also sometimes extended into a more general ethical or philosophical principle of value relativism, or multiculturalism, that specifically challenged the discourse of Western imperialism, particularly in relation to ‘indigenous’ cultures. Here, the third sense of the term ‘culture’ was adopted.

This complex history has given the term ‘culture’ an array of meanings still in circulation today. However, these are rarely explicitly addressed when the word is used by social scientists, the effect being vagueness or fluidity in meaning and thereby uncertainty of interpretation. Some clarification can be provided by noting that usage of the term ‘culture’ is frequently implicated in one or more of the following contrasts:

Culture versus what is worthless or damaging; or culture as a variable, so that degrees or levels of value can be differentiated. This sort of ‘discrimination’ was, of course, central to the aesthetic sense of the term, and also to negative evaluation of elite culture and positive evaluation of working class or popular culture, as well as being built into the second, developmental, sense of the term ‘culture’, where cultural forms are assessed in terms of their progressive or regressive character or effects. It is also worth noting that a positive valuing of culture underpins not just nineteenth- but also twentieth-century anthropological approaches. After all, evaluations of attitudes, behavior, artifacts, products, etc in aesthetic and other terms are ubiquitous in all societies, and these often involve appeals to

26

membership of a particular culture that is taken to be of superior value. In this sense, evaluation is intrinsic to the very notion of culture even in the third sense of the term; even where the analyst does not engage in evaluation.

Culture versus rationality. This is a very different, but equally long-standing, contrast: it can be traced back at least to some of the key figures in the Enlightenment. Here, ‘culture’ is treated as synonymous with ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, or even with ‘myth’ and ‘superstition’. Sometimes, it is argued that these must be eradicated in favour of forms of rationality modeled on scientific thinking and/or on economic calculation.30 This attitude was opposed by many twentieth-century anthropologists, who emphasized the inner logics of other cultures, and the rationality of action in terms of these. Similarly, those working in the field of development studies pointed to the ways in which local cultures could offer protection against the depredations of capitalism and/or could actually facilitate economic development (Geertz 1963; Hirschman 1970). Cultural critics on the Left, from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno onwards, have also challenged the dominant Enlightenment conception of rationality, treating it as ideological, ironically as representing bourgeois culture, not least those aspects of it implicated in Western imperialism.

Culture versus biology. As we saw, this was the original contrast on which the anthropological sense of the term ‘culture’ was based, and even after the focus had shifted to differences between societies in their practices, beliefs, etc this contrast still prevailed. In other words, it was important both for evolutionary and cultural pluralist approaches. However, in much nineteenth century discussion the distinction between culture and biology was somewhat blurred as a result of non-Darwinian views of evolution, according to which cultural attributes could be biologically inherited; and also because strong parallels or links were frequently drawn between biological and cultural inheritance (see Burrow 2000). In the twentieth century, a much sharper distinction between biology and culture was drawn, with the implications of biology, and therefore of ‘race’, for human behavior being downplayed by most anthropologists. Thus, while in that century, and into the twenty-first, there have been attempts by

30 This also relates to ‘culture’s’ complicated relationship to the concept of ‘civilisation’, mentioned earlier.

27

some biologists to explain human behavior in terms of genetic inheritance, these have been sharply resisted by most anthropologists (see, for example, Sahlins 1976).

Cultural versus material factors. Under the aesthetic sense of the term, what was of most value in human life was contrasted with mere material concerns. Here, ‘material’ referred to a preoccupation with money and everyday practical matters, or more broadly with lower rather than higher needs and desires, or with science, technique and technology, rather than human feeling and spiritual matters. Within anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, this contrast took a different form, focusing on whether patterns of behavior are to be explained as the product of values, beliefs, and modes of thinking, or as the result of ecology, technology, and/or economic interests. Within cultural studies, both culturalism and structuralism fell into the former category, but there was also a political economy approach that was materialist in orientation. And the question of the proper balance between an emphasis on material and on cultural factors in social explanations has been a matter of debate, with criticisms of idealism on one side and of reductionism on the other (Williams 1981).

There is a further complication associated with this contrast: built into nineteenth-century physical anthropology was the notion of ‘material culture’ – referring to artefacts of various kinds and to technology. This was deemed to be cultural because it was developed by human beings and passed on from one generation to another (rather than being a product of biology). And in recent years the notion of material culture has been revived, partly through renewed contact between anthropology and archaeology (Miller 1987). Indeed, some have argued that culture, in all its forms, is embodied in material form and to have material effects (see Oswell 2006).31

As I have indicated, each of these contrasts is complex and is therefore open to different interpretations. In combination, they generate a wealth of confusing and sometimes conflicting connotations around the terms ‘culture’ and ‘cultural’. These seriously hamper understanding, so that those terms cannot serve as effective tools for social analysis without clarification. Equally important, though, embedded in the various senses given to ‘culture’

31 In the mid-nineteenth century Lazarus and Steinthal put forward a very modern understanding of the way in which ideal and materials elements of culture interpenetrated one another: see Kalmar 1987:679.

28

are some fundamental problems that are difficult to resolve, some of which have already been mentioned. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the question of whether social scientists should treat the meaning of ‘culture’ as evaluative or descriptive.

Cultural evaluation and social science

As I noted earlier, there is an important sense in which evaluation is essential to the very notion of culture, in all three senses of that term. This is overt in the aesthetic and developmental uses of the term, but even a concern with simply documenting different cultures more or less ‘in their own terms’ tends to assume the value of cultures and may also be read as endorsing the evaluations of the culture being studied, legitimately or not. In other words, suspension of evaluation by social scientists for the purposes of analysis is sometimes extended into adherence to a form of cultural relativism or populism.32 An illustration of the problems associated with this is provided by Shweder’s (2000) discussion of the issue of female genital mutilation.

However, despite the close relationship between culture and evaluation, in my view it is important for social scientists to adopt an objective approach in their work, in the sense of avoiding evaluation of the people, practices, institutions, etc that they are studying in anything but epistemic terms (Hammersley 2011). It is also important that, as far as possible, they guard against any bias in their analyses arising from their own cultural backgrounds, personal or political preferences, ethical commitments, etc. This represents a commitment to what Weber, somewhat misleadingly, labelled ‘value-freedom’ or ‘value-neutrality’.

It is perhaps necessary to underline that this does not imply that evaluation is unimportant, far from it: it is central to all human activity. And the value issues that, for example, the work of Arnold, Bourdieu, and culturally relativist anthropologists highlight are certainly important ones. However, they are not ones that scientific research can resolve on its own or that social scientists have any distinctive authority in addressing. Given this, the specific task of social science, as with natural science, should be restricted to producing descriptive and explanatory knowledge (Hammersley 1995, 2015). Political and social commentary, the provision of policy advice,

32 The reaction against Colin Turnbull’s (1972) study of the Ik, whom he described in negative terms, were often formulated in these terms.

29

advocacy, etc are separate tasks from this. Furthermore, documenting facts is more difficult than often seems to be recognised, and a concern with evaluating social phenomena can seriously distort the process. Given that the justification for the existence, and indeed for the funding, of social science is that it can provide more reliable factual knowledge than is available from other sources, it is important to minimize the risk of such distortion. Equally important, as I have indicated, social scientists have no claim to distinctive expertise in producing evaluations, in the way that they do in the production of factual knowledge.33

This does not mean that the social scientist must rid her or himself of value assumptions. Nor does it deny that our motivation for doing research and for studying particular topics is usually because we hope that doing this will have practical benefit. Neither does it mean that social scientists must keep their value assumptions a secret, not mentioning them in their research reports. It does not even rule out indicating possible evaluative or prescriptive implications that could follow from the factual findings produced. What it does mean is that researchers must not aim at producing value conclusions but only at producing factual ones, and that they must work hard to guard against their own value commitments distorting their pursuit of knowledge. Furthermore, in producing any recommendations on the basis of their work they must make clear that these are conditional on acceptance of the values making up the relevance framework in terms of which the research has been carried out (Hammersley 2014).

As should be clear from the earlier discussion, much social science usage of the term ‘culture’ does not adhere to this requirement. While few if any social scientists today use ‘culture’ in the explicitly evaluative manner of Arnold, as we saw ‘elite culture’ is sometimes negatively evaluated because of what are taken to be its undesirable effects, while working class and popular culture, and/or non-Western cultures, or parts of them, are positively valued in terms of some developmental scheme or in political terms. There is also sometimes advocacy of cultural relativism or pluralism as if this could be validated by research (for example Herskovits 1958, Shweder 2000).34

33 We should also not the failure of much evaluative commentary in cultural studies and other disciplines to make explicit and to justify the value judgments involved

34 In much social science writing these rather different positions are melded together into an inconsistent tendency to valorise what is held to be devalued within current society, at least insofar as it fits within a social scientist’s own values. This not only deviates from the requirement of ‘value-neutrality’ but also falls short of the requirement that the values underlying evaluations should be clearly articulated.

30

So, in my view, the various evaluative senses of the term ‘culture’, both positive and negative, should be avoided by social scientists. However, there still remain other problems with usage of this term. In the next section I will briefly outline these and indicate how the concept of culture might be formulated in a way that avoids or minimizes these.

Other problems

Further problems with the concept of culture concern its relationship with the notion of society, the question of whether there are distinct, clearly-bounded cultures in the modern world (or, indeed, if there ever were), the distinction between biological and social factors in the development of cultures, and the idea of cultures as free-floating phenomena that shape human actions.

Culture versus society. When ‘culture’ is treated as plural and interpreted as referring to a whole way of life, it seems to swallow up much if not all of what normally comes under the heading of ‘society’; and, for that matter, ‘economy’ and ‘polity’ as well. This problem stems not just from the way that ‘culture’ is used but also vagueness in the meanings assigned to the term ‘society’. The latter is sometimes employed to refer to a particular nation-state, and nation-states usually have clearly defined territories. As a result, they are sometimes treated as clearly-bounded systems. However, much of what is typically put under the heading of ‘society’ is neither fully contained within national boundaries nor insulated from what is outside. Furthermore, while nation-states may have relatively coherent political structures, there are also cross-cutting divisions of various kinds within them (for example, in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity, age, etc), some of which have links to other societies, as in the case of diasporic minorities and religious groups that have institutional centres elsewhere. Moreover, ‘society’ may also be used to refer to a component part of a nation, here being distinguished from its polity and its economy, this sometimes (but by no means always) being signaled by use of the phrase ‘civil society’. Finally, ‘society’ is sometimes used to refer to what might be better called sociation: diffuse processes of social interaction and the patterning of human relationships. All of these usages overlap with some interpretations of ‘culture’.

Clearly bounded cultures? Early anthropological conceptualisations of ‘other cultures’ have been criticized for tending to assume that there are

31

isolated communities, each with its own distinctive culture. The problem is that this neglects not only internal cultural differentiations but also the sharing of cultural features across a range of different communities. With growing recognition of the effects of globalization, the problems associated with discussions of distinct cultures as functioning wholes has become even more obvious. One effect of this, sometimes, has been to encourage a narrowing of focus on to smaller groups, in the belief that they will display coherent and distinct cultures. However, it is questionable whether even this succeeds – there has been an increasing tendency to reconceptualise culture in terms of multiple discourses that circulate even within small-scale settings – and it renders the concept inapplicable in much social research. This issue also relates to a longstanding problem in the sociology of knowledge concerned with how cultural features can be rigorously attributed to particular groups (see Child 1941), especially when attention is paid to the contextually variable practices that lay people employ in doing this (Moerman 1968; Sharrock 1944).

Biological and social factors in the development of cultures. Much usage of ‘culture’ assumes that a relatively sharp distinction can be drawn between the biological and the cultural. This was prefigured in Lazarus and Steinthal’s distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ ethnology in the mid-nineteenth century (Kalmar 1987:674). Later, the concept of culture is implicated in battles between the social sciences and biology, with a tendency for each side virtually to deny, or greatly to diminish, the role of what concerns the other. Yet it is widely recognised today that ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ affect one another, and are indeed interrelated in complex ways. Moreover, previous attempts to conceptualise their relationship in an additive fashion, so that their relative contribution to some specific type of outcome – for example high intelligence – can be measured have been shown to be inefffective. There have been some moves towards a reconceptualization of this relationship, but these have not yet had much impact on social research.

The idea of cultures as free-floating. Cultures have frequently been treated as if they were free creations through which groups, communities, or societies express themselves. Moreover, this issues in a form of cultural determinism, sometimes centred on linguistic determinism. This runs against the manner in which culture was viewed in the nineteenth century, when it was frequently seen as consisting of the adaptations that human beings make in order to live in particular environments. Moreover, what is involved here

32

is not just adaptation to physical environments but the interrelationship between these and biological capacities, limitations, and needs, and technological capacities. Furthermore groups of people develop habits and institutionalized patterns of behaviour to address needs and pursue their goals, and these themselves subsequently constitute part of the environment to which later generations must adapt, one way or another, and will themselves shape future cultural patterns: habits and institutions. We have a recursive process here, and it is also an interactive process.

An attempt at conceptualisation

No single analytic concept can cover coherently all of the meanings that are implicated in the term ‘culture’ as it has come to be used today. This means that any attempt at conceptual clarification must focus on one of these meanings, and concentrate on the analytic functions the term can serve. So, what I will suggest here will not be found satisfying by anyone who wishes to retain the multiple denotations and wide connotations of the term. Even aside from this, whether this conceptualization will serve properly analytic functions effectively remains to be seen.

The analytic function I will take as primary is the role of culture in explaining actions or pattern of institutionalized behavior. In this context, I suggest that the term is best treated as referring to the generative, learnt capabilities, attitudes, habits, and technologies, that shape, and are drawn on in, human behavior.35 As should become clear, this cross-cuts the distinction between cultural and biological factors, it marks off culture from most senses of ‘society’, and it eliminates any need to assume the existence of distinct, free-standing cultures. In other words, the reference of this term should be to all the predispositions and resources, each of which will be shared (to varying degrees) with others, that belong or are available to a particular agent at the point of action. In these terms, culture is one of two factors that may be used to explain any action, any institutionalized pattern of behavior, or any outcome of some other kind. The other factor is the situation faced by the agent on the occasion concerned.36 35 This is close to the position taken by Steward. Note that it is assumed that biology plays a crucial role

in the development of the capabilities, attitudes, etc, but that it does not produce them in itself.36 It is important to emphasise that the distinction between culture and situation is an analytic or relational

one: what is treated as cultural and what situational will depend upon the focus of inquiry, and in particular who is the agent (individual or collective) whose behavior is being explained. After all, other people will almost always represent the most important elements of the situation an agent faces, and they will carry cultural features with them that shape their behavior and thereby that situation. What this highlights is the need for the focus of any analysis to be made quite clear, since this will determine what

33

Of course, these two sets of factors – cultural background and immediate social situation – do not exhaust what must be taken into account in the task of sociological explanation. For one thing, each is itself open to further explanation: why is the cultural background of the agent what it is?; and why is the situation how it is? Equally important, though, is the interplay between culture and situation, and this can be more or less ‘active’ on different occasions. Much of human behavior has the character of relatively routine action in which there is little deliberation, and very often this action forms part of institutionalized patterns in which others play similarly habitual roles that mutually support one another (see Berger and Luckmann 1966 on habituation and institutionalization; see chapter on ‘structure’). Here there is little active interplay, though of course situations still have to be made sense of as belonging to one type or another, and thereby requiring one type of response rather than another. While habit is rarely a matter of simple or literal repetition, it always involves free play and at least some variation and drift over time, such institutionalized patterns can nevertheless be contrasted with those where no established culturally given course of action is prompted, where perhaps even the goals being pursued are uncertain. In such situations, reflection and deliberation take place – at least where scope for this is available – often involving considerations of strategy and tactics. As a result, the outcome will be less predictable from knowledge of culture and situation, since elements of both may be open to reassessment, or even to radical reconceptualisation, and thereby adaptation, in the process of action.37

We should also note the way in which what we might call the strings – the shared elements – of culture, for example as they operate within particular families, households, peer groups or local communities, may be drawn together more tightly, materially as well as symbolically, through processes of identification – a sense of mutual belonging. A similar process may occur more widely through the mobilization of support under the banner of some distinctive ethnic, religious, or national identity. This drawing together, creating rather stronger parallels in attitude and behavior among members than existed previously, at the same time involves the

counts as culture and what is situation for its purposes. I should also point out that individual agents can act on behalf of groups, organisations, etc, rather than simply on their own behalf.

37 In outlining this conceptual context in which the sense of ‘culture’ I am recommending operates, I have specifically avoided the term ‘structure’ because of its problematic nature. It should be obvious, though, that what that term is typically used to refer to by social scientists shapes both culture and situation, and thereby the interplay between them. See chapter on Structure.

34

loosening of links or ties elsewhere in the network, indeed the marking off of boundaries and out-groups, again both symbolically and materially. However, such a process does not eliminate the sharing of cultural features across these boundaries.

The interpretation of the term ‘culture’ I have put forward here, while by no means original, is at odds with much conventional usage, where the word is commonly treated as virtually synonymous with ‘community’ or ‘society’, or conversely is restricted in reference to values and norms or to ‘symbol systems’. It seems to me that these approaches either render the term superfluous or restrict its meaning too narrowly. Furthermore, while the approach recommended here allows for cultural variability, it does not require there to be distinct and internally homogeneous cultures. Instead, we can recognize that any actor carries within her or himself a range of cultural tendencies and resources that are differentially shared with others. Nor is there any need to assume that the cultural tendencies and resources characteristic of any individual person at a particular time form a coherent whole. While there may well be a strain to consistency, it seems likely that, as Schutz (1962) argued, this operates only sporadically – emerging when inconsistencies give rise to problems or puzzles – so that there are always likely to be tensions in the cultural background of any actor, and such tensions may have explanatory significance, just as may tensions within the situation faced.

It is important to recognize the analytic or functional character of the concept of culture being put forward here. In Weberian terms it is a way of making sense of what in concrete terms is extremely complex, variable and changing. So, for example, in these terms it would make no sense to think of culture, or of a culture, as a stable object existing in the world on analogy with physical objects or even specific social organizations. Indeed, what counts as culture, and what as situation, is specific to the focus on a particular agent (individual, group, or organization|) in relation to some particular decision, action or outcome. After all, previous situations will have shaped what culture an individual or group brings to a situation, and that situation will also be constituted by the cultural resources that other participants in the situation carry with them at the time. In other words, what is treated as culture is agent-, location-, and time-relative.

Conclusion

35

In this chapter I have examined the various traditions that have informed the ways in which the term ‘culture’ is used today in the social sciences, and the different senses of the term that these have generated. I have also discussed the various problems surrounding usage of the term, and suggested a reformulation of the concept that largely avoids these problems. Whether this will turn out to be productive remains to be seen.

References

Almond, G. and Verba, S. (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

Arnold, M. (1873) Literature and Dogma, London, Smith Elder and Co.

Avineri, S. (1968) Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: His Dis-patches and other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, Garden City, NY, Doubleday.

Baldick, C. (1983) The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932, Ox-ford, Oxford University Press.

Bauman, Z. (2004) ‘Culture and management’, Parallax, 10, 2, pp63-72.

Beidelman,T.O. (1973) ‘Review of Colin M. Turnbull, The Mountain People’, Africa, 43, 2, pp170-1.

Beiser, F. (2011) The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford, Oxford Univer-sity Press.

Bell, D. (1965) The End of Ideology, Second edition, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press.

Bennett, T., Mercer, C. and Woollacott, J. (eds) (1986) Popular Culture and Social Relations, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

Bennett, T., Savage, M., Silva, E., Warde, A., Gayo-Cal, M. and Wright, D. (2009) Culture, Class, Distinction, London, Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1987) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press.

36

Bruford, W. (1975) The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Burke, P. (ed.) (1973) A New Kind of History: From the writings of Febvre, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Burrow, J. (2000) The Crisis of Reason: European thought 1848-1914, New Haven CT, Yale University Press.

Child, A. (1941) ‘The problem of imputation in the sociology of knowledge’, Ethics, 51, 2, pp200-19.

Cohen, A. (1956) Delinquent Boys, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Coleridge, S. T. (1907) Biographia Literaria, Volume 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press. (First published in 1817.)

Collini, S. (1988) Arnold, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Collini, S. (1991) Public Moralists: Political thought and intellectual life in Britain 1850-1930, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Collini, S. (1993) Introduction, in Arnold, M. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Collini, S. (1997) ‘Introduction’, in Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Collins, J. (1891) The Study of English Literature: a plea for its recognition and organization at the universities, London, Macmillan.

Cox, C. and Dyson, A. (eds) (1971) The Black Papers on Education, London, Davis-Poynter.

Daloz, J-P (2010) The Sociology of Elite Distinction: From Theoretical to Comparative Perspectives, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process, Revised edition, Oxford, Blackwell.

37

Forster, M. (2010) After Herder, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Fraser, M., Kember, S., and Lury, C. (2006) Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism, London, Sage.

Gamst, F. and Norbeck, E. (eds) (1976) Ideas of Culture: Sources and uses, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Gouldner, A. (1964) Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, Glencoe ILL, Free Press.

Heine, B. (1985) ‘The Mountain People: Some Notes on the Ik of North-Eastern Uganda’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 55, 1, pp3–1.

Geertz, C. (1973) Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Gielen U. and Jeshmaridian, S. (1999) ‘Lev S. Vygotsky: the man and the era’, International Journal of Group Tensions, 28, 3/4, pp273-301.

Hall, S. (1980) ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’, Media, Culture and Soci-ety, 2, 2, pp57-72.

Hammersley, M. (2011) ‘Objectivity: a reconceptualisation’, in Williams, M. and Vogt, P. (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Methodological Innovation, London, Sage.

Harris, M. (2001) The Rise of Anthropological Theory. Second edition, Wal-nut Creek CA, Altamira.

Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The meaning of style, London, Methuen.

Hennis, W. (2000) Max Weber’s Science of Man, Newbury, Threshold Press.

Herskovits, M. (1958) ‘Some further comments on cultural relativism’, American Anthropologist, 60, 2, pp266-73.

38

Hirschman, A. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.

Hoggart, R. and Williams, R. (1960) ‘Working Class Attitudes’, New Left Review, I, 1, pp26-30.

Iggers, G. (1968) The German Conception of History, Middletown CT, Wes-leyan University Press.

Inglehart, R. (1988) ‘The renaissance of political culture’, American Polit-ical Science Review, 82, 4, pp1203-1230.

Kalmar, I. (1987) ‘The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, 4, pp671-690.

Knight, J. (1994) "'The Mountain People” as tribal mirror’, Anthropology Today, 10, 6, pp1-3.

Kuper, A. (1999) Culture: the anthropologists’ account, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press.

Landow, G. (1985) Ruskin, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Le Quesne, S. (1982) Carlyle, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Leavis, F. (1930) Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Cambridge, Minority Press/Gordon Fraser.

Leavis, F. (1950) ‘Introduction’ to Mill, J. S. On Bentham and Coleridge, London, Chatto and Windus.

Leopold, J. (1980) Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective” E. B. Tylor and the making of Primitive Culture, Berlin, Dietrich Reimer Verlag.

Lewis, O. (1959) Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, New York, Basic Books.

39

Loader, C. (2015) ‘Alfred Weber, “The sociological concept of culture”, Cultural Sociology, 9, 2, pp256–270.

Loring, M. (1935) ‘T. S. Eliot on Matthew Arnold’, The Sewanee Review, 43, 4, pp479-488.

Martin, B. (1981) A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change, Oxford, Blackwell.

McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism, London, Routledge.

McLennan, G. (2006) Sociological Cultural Studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford, Blackwell.

Miller, S. and Riessman, F. (1961) ‘The working class subculture: A new view’, Social Problems, 9, pp86-97.

Miller, W. (1958) ‘Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency’, Journal of Social Issues, 14, 3, pp5-19/

Mintz, S. (1956) ‘Cañamelar: The Subculture of a Rural Sugar Plantation Proletariat’, in Steward, J.H., et al., The People of Puerto Rico. Urbana ILL, University of Illinois Press, pp314-417.

Moerman, M. (1968) ‘Being Lue: uses and abuses of ethnic identification’, in Helm, J. (ed.) Essays on the Problem of Tribe, Seattle, University of Washington Press.Montaigne, M. (1580) ‘Of cannibals’, in The Complete Essays, London, Penguin, 1993.

Mulhern, F. (1979) The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, London, New Left Books.

Muller, J. (1987) The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

40

Oswell, D. (2006) Culture and Society: An introduction to Cultural Studies, London, Sage.

Parker, H. (2011) ‘Toward a definition of popular culture’, History and Theory, 50, pp147-70.

Penny, H. G. and Bunzl, M. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Penny, H. G. and Bunzl, M. (eds) Worldly Provincialism: German anthropology in the age of empire, Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press.

Richards, I. A. (1926) Principles of Literary Criticism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Rosenberg, B. and White, D. M. (eds) (1957) Mass Culture: The popular arts in America, Glencoe ILL, Free Press.

Sahlins, M. (1976) The Use and Abuse of Biology: An anthropological critique of sociobiology, Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press.

Sahlins, M. and Service, E. (1960) Evolution and Culture, Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press.

Schutz, A. (1962) Collected Papers, Volume 1, The Hague, Martin Nijhoff.

Sharrock, W. (1974) ‘On owning knowledge’, in Turner, R. (ed.) Ethnomethodology, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Shweder, R. (2000) ‘What about "Female Genital Mutilation"? And why understanding culture matters in the first place’, Daedalus, 129, 4, pp. 209-232

Smircich, L. (1983) ‘Concepts of culture and organisational analysis’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, pp339-58.

Snow, C. P. (1959) The two cultures and the scientific revolution, in Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Steward, J. (1955) Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution, Urbana ILL, University of Illinois Press.

41

Stocking, G. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution, Glencoe ILL, Free Press.

Stocking, G. (1983) ‘The ethnographer’s magic: Fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski’, in Stocking, G. (ed.) Observers Observed: Essays on ethnographic fieldwork, Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press

Stocking, G. (1987) Victorian Anthropology, New York, Free Press.

Stocking, G. (1995) After Tylor: British social anthropology 1888-1951, Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press.

Swingewood, A. (1977) The Myth of Mass Culture, London, Macmillan.

Thompson, E. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class, London, Gollancz.

Trotsky, L. (1924) ‘Leninism and library work’, in Problems of Everyday Life, New York, Monad Press, 1973.

Turnbull, Colin M. The Mountain People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. 

Tylor, E.B. (1974) Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom, New York, Gordon Press. (First published in 1871.)

White, L. (1959) The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, New York, McGraw-Hill,

Willey, B. (1949) Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold, London, Chatto and Windus.

Williams, R. (1957) ‘The Uses of Literature: Working class culture’, Universities & Left Review,1, 2, pp29-32.

Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society, London, Chatto and Windus.

Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution, London, Chatto and Windus.

42

Williams, R. (1981) Culture, London, Fontana.

Williams, R. (1993) Culture and Society, third edition, London, Hogarth Press.

Willis, P. (1979) ‘Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage form’, in Clarke, J., Critcher, C., and Johnson, R. (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory, London, Hutchinson.

Wittfogel, K. (1957) Oriental Despotism, New Haven CT, Yale University Press.

Yinger, M. (1960) ‘Contraculture and subculture’, American Sociological Review 25, pp625-35.

Young, M. F. D. (2008) Bringing Knowledge Back In, London, Routledge.

Zammito, J. (2002) Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

43